The push for digital textbooks is only going to get bigger now that Apple has announced their next big idea is to disrupt the textbook industry. In New York last week they announced an unprecedented partnership with three major textbook publishers: Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt.
According to McGraw-Hill’s CEO, Steve Jobs wanted to revolutionize the textbook industry in the same way that iTunes has with music and video. This time the hardware isn’t the iPod but the iPad. And the application that will attempt to repeat their previous success isn’t iTunes but iBooks2.
Some of the major themes behind the move by Apple, besides increasing the sales of iPads, include: lowering the cost of textbooks, integrating interactive content alongside textual content, 
and adding features to textbooks that further facilitate learning.
Lowering the Cost:
Apple has the goal of reducing cost per textbook from $75 (for a high school level book) to $14.99 on the iBook store. The business model for the publishers is actually quite interesting. They would apparently lose very little revenue, if any despite the significant price drop. All Things D has a great article explaining the pricing model.
More Interactive Content:
iBooks will offer a wide variety of media to be placed alongside textual content. Videos, images, quotes, presentations etc. In this way, digital textbooks will become a platform for multimedia that offers multiple ways to connect with learners. For those that are visual learners, this should be exciting. No longer is your book relegated to boxes of text and hours of reading. There will be other pieces of content to add variety and break up the endless sea of words.
More Efficient Learning:
Along with the increased interaction will come tools that better facilitate learning, integrated into the book itself. Study tools like highlighting, bookmarking, creating note cards, taking quizzes, responding to review questions, and the ability to search the text of the book will all be possible for publishers to include. With iBooks the days of hand writing notes or note cards is over. It can all be done natively from the textbook.
Another Winner?
It sounds like Apple may have another winner on it’s hands already. Especially given the partnerships it’s formed with some major players in the textbook industry. They’re positioning themselves to be the lead innovator in digital textbooks. This is hugely important for higher education as more and more students complain about the rising cost of textbooks. We’ll have to wait and see what happens as Apple tries to continue their tradition of disrupting and innovating to improve an industry. This time it’s textbooks and education that Apple has in it’s sights. Although, it would seem their focus is mainly the K-12 arena for now, higher education will also be affected. iBooks is becoming a part of the iTunes U complete course ecosystem that Apple is just beginning to gain momentum with.
More on iBooks:
-ML
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