By Adam Satariano and Edmund Lee - Jan 19, 2012 10:43 PM GMT+0700
Apple Inc. (AAPL) introduced a product to make digital versions of textbooks available on the iPad and beef up the education content available for the tablet computer, which is gaining popularity in classrooms.
The new service, called iBooks 2, is intended to help make textbooks more interactive and searchable, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of product marketing, said today at an event in New York. More than 1.5 million iPads are being used for educational purposes, he said.
With students, school districts and universities snapping up iPads, Apple is bolstering the educational content available for the top-selling device. The new tools are designed to kick- start the nascent electronic-textbook business so a broad range of authors can make material available to students in a digital format.
The e-textbooks will have embedded video, interactive pictures, as well as features for highlighting texts and creating flash cards, Apple executives said at the event today.
The company also introduced software tools, called iBooks Author, to create textbooks. IBooks Author will be free and publishing partners include Pearson Plc (PSON), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill Cos. (MHP), Apple said.
Education is one piece of how the iPad became the fastest- selling consumer-electronics product in history. As of September, Apple had sold about 40 million iPads, generating $25.3 billion in sales. The iPad is Apple’s second-best selling product, behind the iPhone and ahead of Mac personal computers and iPod music players.
More Engaging
School districts in California, Nevada, New York, New Jersey and Texas are among those that have allocated funds to use the iPad in classrooms. Advocates of student use of the iPad say its interactive features, such as games and quizzes, are more engaging than textbooks for modern students.
The textbook-publishing market is valued at $10 billion by the Association of American Publishing. Cupertino, California- based Apple joins companies such as Inkling Systems Inc. and Kno Inc., which produce software to make textbooks more interactive and appealing with features such as videos, audio, 3-D pictures and quizzes. Chegg Inc., a popular textbook-rental service, announced a new e-textbook offering yesterday.
The e-textbook market is still small. On college campuses, even as the latest best-sellers have become popular for devices such as Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)’s Kindle reader, digital textbooks were just 2.8 percent of total textbook sales in 2010, according to the National Association of College Stores.
To contact the reporters on this story: Edmund Lee in New York at elee310@bloomberg.net; Adam Satariano in San Francisco at asatariano1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
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