Apple is back to the education market with the uncovering of their iBooks 2 at a media event held at New York City’s Guggenheim museum. Encouraged by the claims that the company already has a good place in the market with people using around 1.5 million iPads for educational purposes, Phil Schiller suggest that iBook 2 will work as the reinvention of the textbook.

Students will get to interact with their textbooks in an entirely new way with iBooks 2. The 3D models and the video clips present in the chapters of the books will be well supplemented by the gestures such as swipe and pinch-to-zoom. Content could be viewed in portrait or landscape mode, text could be highlighted for note-taking or for making virtual flash cards. With content always up to date, conventional print textbooks will become obsolete even before being printed at the publication houses.

A free Mac OS X application named iBooks Authors has also got rolled out from Apple especially for the developers creating textbooks that could be run on iBooks 2. This app will include special templates that will help in the creation of books as well as provide drag and drop ability for images, videos and even the word files into a page.

Initially, Apple will be getting into partnership with publishers like Houghton Miffin Harcout, Pearson, and McGrow Hill, which publish above 90% of all the textbooks available in the U.S. market. The textbooks will be individually priced at about $14.99 or less which will be far lesser than the cost of physical books that happen to be available at $100 or more individually for the college level. Notably, once you have bought the book, you can redownload any time without the need of any extra charges.

One can get hold of iBooks 2 for iPad for free from the App Store. The first set of textbooks available online will be for math, science, and other faculties.

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  3. Toshiba Netbooks with Harman/Kardon Speakers Introduced by Abans
  4. Microsoft to Develop Office Suite for iPad

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