The Cell Phone Junkie

Apple Thursday announced iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U for the education sector.  First, a new version of iBooks for the iPhone and iPad, called iBooks 2.  The iteration adds items for education, including textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, videos and 3D photos.  Users can also highlight and take notes inside of a book.  iBooks 2 adds a new Textbooks section in the iBookstore, and is a free download in the iTunes App Store.

Next, iBooks Author is a free Mac OSX application for creating iBooks.  Templates are available, and it allows for easy importation of content already written in Word.  The app also lets you drag in images, videos or other media to the book, and even create Keynote presentations from your product.  Once the written work is completed, the book can be published straight to the iBookstore.  iBooks Author is available for free in the Mac App Store.

Then, Apple announced a number of new partners, including Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the content creators of 90% of all textbooks.  All High School textbooks are being launched for $14.99 or less.

Finally, Apple released an iTunes U application for the iPad and iPhone, allowing teachers and professors to communicate with students from their iOS devices.  The app allows access to materials such as class syllabi, professor hours, course notes, videos and iBooks notes.  The app is now available for free with access to K through 12 classes.

Along with the new items that came out of the press conference, Apple released a new version of iTunes to allow the sync of interactive iBooks textbooks to your iPad and also presumably to add new features for iBooks 2.0 and updated iTunes U program.  iTunes 10.5.3 is now available as a free download on the Mac App Store

Source: The Verge