The textbook -- that sturdy, time-honored educational stalwart -- is primed for a serious makeover.
Apple last week took the wraps off an initiative it hopes will revolutionize the textbook by giving K-12 students a more interactive experience.
And it has has inked deals with three top traditional textbook publishers -- Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Building off the success of the iPad, Apple showed off a set of sleek, interactive textbooks that allow students to play videos and interact with graphics.
Interactive and digital textbooks are not new, but Apple's program is ambitious enough to begin to move an industry that has gone largely unchanged for decades.
And when Apple makes a bid for a platform like this, the targeted industry usually takes note. Apple has already changed the way we download music with iTunes and has made smaller inroads into the television and movie industries.
Apple has sold e-books since the launch of the iPad, but has struggled to make a dent in a market controlled by Amazon and its army of Kindle users.
Apple's ace here, though, is the iPad, which has shown to have particular utility in the classroom. There are 1.5 million iPads in use in educational institutions today, Apple says.
Zeeland Public Schools in west Michigan embarked on an initiative last fall that will eventually put an iPad in the hands of every student in grades 3-12. In the Upper Peninsula, the Calumet-Laurium-Keweenaw school district has a similar program. And numerous Michigan districts have smaller programs that include a stack of iPads that can be moved from classroom to classroom.
Publish through iBooks
With the launch of its new interactive textbook platform, Apple has also released a publishing tool that will allow anyone to write, design and publish a book.
It's called iBooks Author and it's a free download through the Mac App Store. There is no version for PCs.
Anyone familiar with Apple's suite of desktop publishing programs -- Pages, Keynote, Numbers -- will be at home in iBooks Author.
It's easy to drag and drop images, videos and text blocks to create a great-looking textbook. Apple has included six templates to get you going.
I was able to take the beginnings of a textbook on social media I'm writing and have it all dressed up in 20 minutes.
Once the book is created, the author is free to give it to anyone he or she chooses. Books can be saved in an iBook format so that they're readable on the iPad or as a PDF, which can be sent to a classroom of students and read on almost any device.
But, and this is a big but, the only way to sell the work created with iBooks Author is through Apple's iBooks store. That language is included in the software's licensing agreement.
In true Apple style, it's an aggressively worded agreement that makes it clear that Apple is expecting its 30% cut of any of the beautiful books produced with its free program.
Cheaper than traditional texts
Increasingly, technology companies like Apple are playing the role of publisher -- even as they work to court traditional publishers that are understandably wary of the iPad-maker's growing clout.
Apple knows that content -- apps, books and movies -- often is the real appeal of a device like the iPad, so it also wants to make it very easy for anyone to contribute.
Amazon, too, has lowered that bar. Through its Kindle Singles program, authors can self-publish works from 5,000 to 30,000 words and make them available to the millions of people with Amazon e-readers.
Amazon also takes a 30% cut of sales.
But the textbook industry is certainly primed for innovation. Most texts run almost $100 and often are a bit outdated.
Apple says it will limit its interactive textbooks to $15.
So far, the selection of these new interactive textbooks is meager -- just eight.
But that number will surely grow as more people experiment with Apple's free publishing tool.
And the best part: no paper cuts.
Contact Mark W. Smith: 313-223-4424 or msmith@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @markdubya.
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