It was Apple’s first major announcement since the death of Steve Jobs and arguably the most important to-do of the late co-founder. Having already disrupted the music industry, Hollywood and apps, can Apple revolutionize yet another industry? With immersive and engaging digital textbooks that cost less than $15, it just might.
“Education is deep in our DNA and it has been from the very beginning,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, during his opening statements at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. At the event, Apple revealed a new version of its iBooks software that allows publishers to create interactive textbooks for high school students.
Rather than destroy the textbook industry, as some had pontificated before yesterday’s announcement, Apple partnered with three of the major textbook publishers, including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson and McGraw-Hill.
Apple also released a free tool called iBooks Author, an app for Mac computers that allows just about anyone to make interactive, digital textbooks. But if this what Steve Jobs meant when he said the education industry was “ripe for digital destruction,” the publishers didn’t seem too worried.
“The focus on textbooks for high schools is welcoming and exciting,” said Terry McGraw, CEO of McGraw-Hill. “That’s why we started with five books and we’ll have five more by September.
While the iBooks Author tool allows anyone to publish their own textbooks, Apple says the books will be vetted before being published to the iBooks store.
“Apple is really just providing an additional choice for professors and students to access content and enhance the educational experience,” James Howard, academic materials manager for the Oregon State University Bookstore, told The Daily. “The bookstore itself may or may not be a part of that but we provide enough variety that as a nonprofit operation we’ll still be just as viable and robust on campus.”
Textbooks for grades K-12 that Apple is now offering through iBooks are cheap; the vessel in which you consume those interactive books is not. But some might argue that the $500 price tag is inconsequential considering the price of regular textbooks.
“The cost of a $500 device and seven $15 textbooks might rival the cost of those same seven hardcover textbooks,” Basil Kolani, director of information services at the Dwight School, an elite preparatory academy in New York, told The Daily. “And on top of that, you’re getting a more dynamic and engaging experience, with room to take notes in an innovative way — all in one thing to carry around.”
Apple also announced a dedicated iOS app for its iTunes U catalog of content, which currently has more than 1,000 participating universities in the U.S. The new app will allow teachers to “create and manage courses including essential components such as lectures, assignments, books, quizzes and syllabuses” that anyone in the world can download.
When asked why Apple and its publishing partners weren’t offering iBooks for universities, where textbooks are considerably more expensive, McGraw mentioned the need to focus on high schools first.
“High schools have been left behind. We’re only graduating 70 percent of our high school students and half of them are not college or career ready and that’s where we need to start,” said McGraw.
iBooks 2 may not have been Jobs’ “one last thing” — that will most likely be the Apple Television or the iPhone 5 — but it may have the biggest impact where it matters: schools. Students in the U.S. have fallen behind the rest of the world and no longer rank near the top among industrialized countries in reading, math and science, as Schiller noted in his opening remarks. Maybe the iPad really is “magical.”
“Steve and I started talking about this last June,” said McGraw. “We agreed that by combining the world of technology and the world of applications, you can graduate into the world of learning.”
By all accounts, Apple has graduated into the education industry and, as Schiller put it, is “on the cusp of something great.”