Apple’s new education products – including interactive textbooks for the iPad, created via an easy-to-use iBooks Author – could do many things: boost test scores, give school districts a new way to instruct students, and allow educators to piece together their own textbooks with the latest information.
And according to one analyst, they could also potentially pump up Apple’s bottom line.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who regularly covers the company, issued a 19 January research note suggesting that Apple’s announcements will “help to generate demand for iPads in schools” and give the company a first-mover advantage in that segment over other potential rivals.
Apple unveiled its latest education initiative in a high-profile 19 January event at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum. “Education is deep in our DNA,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, told the assembled media.
Apple’s iBooks 2 is designed to bring a “new textbook experience” to the iPad, which the company views as an evolution beyond traditional, paper-bound textbooks. These interactive textbooks will feature not only multimedia such as video and touchable graphics, but also tools such as highlighting and search.
The company’s other initiative, iBooks Author, lets authors and publishers create those interactive textbooks. The interface seems reminiscent of Apple’s other productivity software; it offers the ability to add everything from text to graphics by drag-and-dropping, with text flowing automatically around each new added element.
Apple’s third big education announcement, the revamped iTunes U, is a free app gives educators the ability to distribute course materials and video or audio lectures, as well as view presentations. As with iBooks Author, Apple is emphasising the supposed ease-of-use in constructing a full course, via the iTunes U Course Manager.
Before his death, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs long harboured an abiding interest in creating some sort of text-book related product. “He wanted to disrupt the textbook industry and save the spines of spavined students bearing backpacks by creating electronic texts and curriculum material for the iPad,” read one passage in Jobs’ recent biography by Walter Isaacson.
At another point, Jobs “agreed” with News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch that “the paper textbook business would be blown away by digital learning materials”.
Whether or not textbooks on iPad will noticeably change the tablet’s adoption pattern over the next few years, they could bring Apple into fiercer competition with Amazon, which is also moving from book distributor to more of a book producer.
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ebook, epub, ibook, pdf, text, apps, websites !
What is needed in this "affair" is a new role more than anything else.
This new role could be described as "personal contracts/licences holder" "account managers for personal contract/licences and login/passwds or certificates"(no contents or copies in there, just references), something like that, several of them of course, and ability to move all your "assets" or "belongings" from one to the other, so that a trust relationship can exist regarding the privacy of these data (and privacy of these data also under strong legal constraints for these organisations).
Then you can have an environment with a clear role separation between these organisations on one side, and editors, on line shops, on line content holders and difusers on the other.
Which then could allow a user to buy an ebook, apps, websites (access to) "for life"(or with some timing guarenteed in a strict legal point of view, but "for life" in spirit), possibility of upgrade if new edition and you feel like it, and that's it.
Enough with these "private bookshelves"(music, video, sito shelves) linked to some device maker, on line shops, "social network", or some other giant !
A bit more developed below :
http://iiscn.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/concepts-economie-numerique-draft/
(and in the "copies_licences" text (2007) linked in the post)
And almost EVERYTHING already there really