Apple announces iBooks 2, iBooks Author to "reinvent textbooks"

[DainBramaged]

Source: Ars technca

"iBooks" are no longer old Apple laptops made out of white plastic, nor are they simply e-books to be purchased within Apple's iBookstore. Apple announced what it's calling "iBooks 2" during its media event in New York on Thursday, a textbook software program that allows textbook-makers and instructors to create rich, interactive teaching media for the iPad. As we first reported earlier this week, the announcement is akin to "GarageBand for e-books," giving authors access to easy-to-use tools on the computer in order to create multimedia content for the iPad.

Books created within iBooks 2 can have all manner of media attached, complete with multitouch capabilities. The company listed numerous ways in which iBooks 2 authors can create engaging content for students, including multiple-choice questions with immediate feedback within the text, the ability to make notes and highlights that can be found in a single location as note cards or sprinkled throughout the text, ways to explore embedded graphics and 3D animations, full-motion movies, and more.

iBooks 2 itself is an app for the iPad, but books for the application can be found within the already existing iBookstore under a new "textbook" category, with free samples available to those who want to try out the books first. Students can use codes to redeem them for books and can re-download them whenever they need to.

But how does one create a textbook for iBooks 2? Apple also announced a Mac application on Thursday called "iBooks Author," which Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller described as "powerful and feature-rich." The interface, as demoed to the audience, is similar to Apple's iWork applications and allows authors to format books through WYSIWYG interaction and format the pages in a variety of ways. (It's worth noting that news broke on Wednesday that Apple had commandeered its VP of productivity applications Roger Rosne to head up this project.)



Read more: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/apple-announces-ibooks-2-to-reinvent-textbooks.ars

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it's the end of the paper books as we know them


The price of the books is capped at $14.99 or less.

[lbrtbell]

1. People have been predicting a paperless society for years

It's never happened, and never will in our lifetime. Remember how the internet was going to kill books and magazines? We're still waiting for that to happen. ;)

People like the tactile sense of having paper in their hands. Printed pages cause far less eyestrain, making reading more pleasurable. Paper can be recycled, whereas an iPad or other eBook reader requires electricity, which adds to our energy problems.

Besides, very few people can afford to have a spare iPad for kids to read books on. And what if Junior drops it down the toilet?

We already have a way of sharing information with multimedia. It's called the World Wide Web. As usual, Apple is just trying to take an old concept and pretend they discovered it, so they can overprice it and sell it to Apple fanboys who would buy iPoop if Apple started selling it. :rofl:

[DainBramaged]

2. You haven't noticed the disappearance of magazines and newspapers

and the fact that most magazines have so little advertising that they will fail to exist by 2015.......


Keep your abacus, the world will continue.....


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7609940

[onehandle]

4. You will pry my butter churn from my cold dead hands.

Where the hell am I? This isn't DU3.

[arikara]

5. I was told by an author friend

that paper books won't be published anymore, she said as soon as a couple of years. She's been ordering paper books by the dozen, I don't know where she puts them all. She did say that used book stores will do a great business.

[NYC_SKP]

3. For what textbooks cost, every kid can have an iPad and tons of iBooks.

And those iBooks last forever, you can mark them up, they can be replaced for free and I'm excited about the possibilities.

But we'll still have books, reference books and picture books and, well, comic books!