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Apple Launches iBooks 2 with Interactive Textbooks

alchemistmuffin said:
Exactly my point. Many students don't have iPads. Hence the reason why Apple should've made textbooks also available on iPhone and iPod touch, since retina display gives you same experience you get on the iPad with smaller device.
Click to expand...

LOL it's nothing like the iPad experience. you mistake resolution for screen real estate

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peaksutah said:
So Apple's introducing a feature today that will make sense, storage-wise, on an iPad made 5 years from now. Awesome.
Click to expand...

Gotta start somewhere.

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charlituna said:
I don't know a single grade school kid that has a 14 hour day even including bus rides and football practice. Certainly not a day that long where they would be using their iPad the whole time.
Click to expand...

The 14 hour battery life is so if the student chooses, he can work all day long.
 
marcusj0015 said:
You seem to forget the simple answer as to why iPad instead of iPhone/iPod. the size makes reading practical. you couldn't read a textbook on an iPhone.
Click to expand...

Uhhh, kids today have better eyesight. They can read on devices that small. Trust me, my friend's 2 children can read an entire children's novel on their iPod touch from start to finish. They can pretty much tolerate reading textbook on iPhone as well.

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marcusj0015 said:
LOL it's nothing like the iPad experience. you mistake resolution for screen real estate
Click to expand...


Actually, wrong. Flipboard brought the same iPad experience to the iPhone with just only minor adjustments in terms of flipping. This shows you can bring iPad experience to smaller screen without sacrificing features. (and in Flipboard's case, brought a feature that's on iPhone that should've been on iPad version in first place)

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baryon said:
Yes, that would help those who do have an iPod Touch or iPhone. But still, what about those who don't have any of these devices? You can't expect 10 students to use their iDevices while the other 20 in class just use the old text books, that just won't work. It's either all or nothing, and I really can't see how every single student in a given class would have an iDevice, let alone an iPad. I also don't see why the kids wouldn't start playing games in class while they're at it, that what we used to do at school on our graphing calculators whenever we had a chance, which is why we were only aloud to use them in certain classes where it was really necessary.
Click to expand...

Hence the reason why school owned iPads will have restrictions set by parental controls via iPhone configuration utility, where it can disable apps like Safari, App Store, etc.

If you have concerns about students using their own iPads for "childish things", have a school policy of no personal iPads, only school issued iPads allowed during school.
 
Apple just did it again.

While the Android side busy and touting about hardware spec, hexacore, 12TB of RAM, blah blah blah glass, yada yada GPU, Apple done something more meaningful, something for our education and future.

Yea yea that maybe a little bit cheesy. But really, Apple is the king of content. iTunes store has been around for how many years now? And Google haven't been able to compete with it properly. Well Kindle Fire is pretty decent though, but yeah, Google does not count it as their own tablet, does it? :p
Let's think about it. If Apple decides to go crazy, releasing iTunes Store .. and maybe AppStore to Android Market. Imagine how well they would do?

But also ...
Not all about iBooks 2 sounds right in my book too (whoa kinda like the rhyme there, book book :D ). Why "threatening" authors for making books exclusive for iBookStore? What's the incentive?

Why not give them an option, like this .. if they would go exclusive for iBookstore, Apple give them 80% revenue (20% cuts) instead of usual 70% .. that would be tempting for authors and would make them go crazy about giving exclusivity. Automatically, voluntarily, and happily.
 
About the cost issue, in Australia we have school issue laptops (some are Macs) where the parents pay for the laptop as part of the school fees. The school puts all the required software on it (in this case it would be apps) then locks them with an admin password so that the kids can't install any other software without the password. With iPads the same could be done as iPads probably could replace school issue laptops (depending on the software required), and disable the app store in restrictions.
 
Oh yeah, and one more thing. Apple should also thinking about selling iBooks copy on regular bookstore.

That way you don't ruin the economy, book store still can be exist and in fact, they also sell ibooks. They can display some demo on the store's iPad, and customer who like it can just go to cashier, receive the copy on your iPad or Apple ID and walk away.

You might be thinking, why would I do that? I could just browse the iBookStore, pick, buy and download. Yeah of course.
But really, walking around in a bookstore is just ridiculously fun. Unlike some mere browsing on the internet, I can pick books, I can look around and enjoy the layout of a nice book store, well maybe meet a nice girl too? :p I can read books just for fun, and free at the regular bookstore.

You can't do that on iBookStore. Just staring & browsing on your iPad. Uugh .. so lonely if you ask me.
 
Interactive text books on the iPad are a fantasic idea.

I wish we had this when I was at school. I wouldn't have needed to carry these huge heavy text-books, and they were heavy.

But no, we had paper text books and the most amazing technology we had was Apple II computers and in the library, the search computers were 8086 powered things which took a long time to return the search results.

Students these days have things better than we did. Gosh, I sound so old saying that! :D
 
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avro707 said:
Interactive text books on the iPad are a fantasic idea.
.....
I wish we had this when I was at school. I wouldn't have needed to carry these huge heavy text-books, and they were heavy.

Students these days have things better than we did.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah I know how that feels. But think about it, as 'ancient' your school facility you thought you had then, it's still better than your parent's. Only Apple II in the library? Well our mom and dad may still have to climb a ladder just to search a specific books. The most expensive item back then must be a typing machine instead of Apple II.
I bet not many of them still have a car. You might have to go cycling hence you lived your parent's time. Or depends on where you live, your country might even in a war.

So yeah, I don't complain much or feel sorry if kids nowaday seems to get things easy. It has always been that way, actually. It's called progress and I do thankful I can enjoy Mac and iDevice as I do today, although no fancy school iBooks for me to sweeten my childhood :)
 
baryon said:
Yeah but don't forget that iDevices go obsolete after about 2-3 years. My 2nd gen iPod Touch is pretty unusable now, and it's 3 years old. No student would be able to do anything with such a slow device, so I'd say it has a useful life of 2 years. An iPad maybe more, but it's still much shorter than textbooks, which each student buys and sells each year, costing almost nothing.
Click to expand...

I see your point, but I don't think it would be an issue in terms of simply storing and accessing textbooks. Obviously today's ipad2, and even the older ipad1 would be able to perform this function even in 10 years, unless the electronic textbook technology introduces new things. But what else can they introduce? Holograms? 3d?

I don't get 1) when people say textbooks for public ed kids are free (they aren't, taxpayers pay for them) and 2) that providing tax paid ipads to each student would be more expensive than the current textbooks bought by taxes. It seems that paying $100 for a textbook, even if it does last 3-4 years and services 3-4 different students, $14.99/year/student still adds up to less than buying the paper textbook. $100/4years versus $60/4years is less expensive by almost half and leaves a small subsidy for buying an ipad, lets say the ipad lasts 10 years that leaves a $100 subsidy, and that's only for ONE textbook, multiply that by say 6 textbooks a typical student might need, that ipad might be free for the school. Schools can buy ipad1's, 16gb still holds probably 8-10 textbooks and they can be made thin clients in kiosk mode. Apple can at the very minimum provide the education discount, but I'll bet they would provide a MUCH larger discount selling them in bulk like that to educational facilities, I'm sure there would be some large tax breaks for them to do so. The technology should last 5-10 years if not longer assuming textbooks stay similar to how they are today.

How much do parents pay extra cash for things like school trips and such? I wouldn't have an issue paying something extra if it was reasonable if my child had the advantages of having their textbooks on an ipad. As a provider who sees kids with back problems due to carrying heavy books all day long I can espouse this as a HUGE benefit as well. I'll bet with a volume deal and tax breaks and the subsidy from paying less for electronic textbooks the ipads end up costing the school very little if anything, and end up costing the taxpaying parent the same or less than they are paying currently.
 
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alchemistmuffin said:
Uhhh, kids today have better eyesight. They can read on devices that small. Trust me, my friend's 2 children can read an entire children's novel on their iPod touch from start to finish. They can pretty much tolerate reading textbook on iPhone as well.

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Actually, wrong. Flipboard brought the same iPad experience to the iPhone with just only minor adjustments in terms of flipping. This shows you can bring iPad experience to smaller screen without sacrificing features. (and in Flipboard's case, brought a feature that's on iPhone that should've been on iPad version in first place)

----------



Hence the reason why school owned iPads will have restrictions set by parental controls via iPhone configuration utility, where it can disable apps like Safari, App Store, etc.

If you have concerns about students using their own iPads for "childish things", have a school policy of no personal iPads, only school issued iPads allowed during school.
Click to expand...

LOL, Dude, I'm 20.
 
It's good to see that iBooks is making a huge impact for some, but this "change" that the world sees in Apple's marketing videos is very confined. Until I am given the ability to get my textbooks for High School on my iPad, until I can bring in my iPad to take notes, there is no connection. For this to really make a HUGE impact, more schools have to start making the switch to Apple. We can't even take notes on a laptop, still the pen and paper methods where I go. When this actually starts having some benefits for more students, then it is going to completely take off.
 
How are all students supposed to cough up the money for a brand new iPad? The students who can afford an iPad probably already have one. I am not familiar with the situation in the US but I can imagine that not every school has the funds to buy one per student. The least they could do is offer the same educational discount they extend to all students who buy computers.

Why is this not offered on the Mac? All students use a computer which they are going to need anyway, not all of them use tablets. If Apple was sincere about helping students, they would want to get this out to as many of them as possible.

I remember what I was like in high school the textbooks were not the problem, it was that the syllabus itself was boring and putting, this is going to improve the learning experience from "boring" to "tolerable". Once the novelty wears off, students are just going to use the iPads to log in to Facebook in class but that is not Apple's problem.
 
Don't need 10.5.3 iTunes

I was able to drop an iBooks Author book into iTunes (v10.5.2) and it sync'd properly to my iPad and opened in the just-updated iBooks2 app. No need to update.

So what is really in the update? Something that might prevent content I create (and eMail to a friend) from being sync'd with someone else's iPad through their iTunes 10.5.3?

Just wondering...

However, I do love the ability to create a smart-looking eBook sans interactivity if I wish.

BTW: Rename the iPad book you "shared" from iBooks Author with an "epub" extension (instead of the "ibook") and you may open it in Sigil or convert it with Calibre. You do lose some iBooks specificity, however, but I haven't tested exactly what yet.
 
peaksutah said:
So Apple's introducing a feature today that will make sense, storage-wise, on an iPad made 5 years from now. Awesome.
Click to expand...

Yes. On an original 4GB iPhone, you couldn't put hundreds of apps (oh we didn't have apps anyway), hours of music and videos onto it. But 5 years later you got a 64GB iPhone 4S which also costs you less. This is how technology evolves. It's always not "good enough".

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iSayuSay said:
Apple just did it again.

While the Android side busy and touting about hardware spec, hexacore, 12TB of RAM, blah blah blah glass, yada yada GPU, Apple done something more meaningful, something for our education and future.

Yea yea that maybe a little bit cheesy. But really, Apple is the king of content. iTunes store has been around for how many years now? And Google haven't been able to compete with it properly. Well Kindle Fire is pretty decent though, but yeah, Google does not count it as their own tablet, does it? :p
Let's think about it. If Apple decides to go crazy, releasing iTunes Store .. and maybe AppStore to Android Market. Imagine how well they would do?

But also ...
Not all about iBooks 2 sounds right in my book too (whoa kinda like the rhyme there, book book :D ). Why "threatening" authors for making books exclusive for iBookStore? What's the incentive?

Why not give them an option, like this .. if they would go exclusive for iBookstore, Apple give them 80% revenue (20% cuts) instead of usual 70% .. that would be tempting for authors and would make them go crazy about giving exclusivity. Automatically, voluntarily, and happily.
Click to expand...
It's not the BOOK that has to be exclusive to the iBookStore.

it's just the FILE that is created by iBooks Author that has to be exclusive to the iBookStore.
 
baryon said:
Yeah but don't forget that iDevices go obsolete after about 2-3 years. My 2nd gen iPod Touch is pretty unusable now, and it's 3 years old. No student would be able to do anything with such a slow device, so I'd say it has a useful life of 2 years. An iPad maybe more, but it's still much shorter than textbooks, which each student buys and sells each year, costing almost nothing.
Click to expand...

My iPad 1 runs the free sample textbook pretty terribly. To the least, they should cheap out with RAM. 256MB RAM on the original iPad is becoming unusable. Can't wait for iPad 3. They better put 1GB on it especially the RAM price is really low.

Btw you get nothing back by selling your textbook if it's like when I was in college.
 
blue22 said:
Hypercard?! Wow, talk about old school. ;)
Click to expand...

Yup. I even used in on a ][GS - the first Apple with a color finder.
Hypercard was a great product that Apple dropped the ball on - it's a shame since it had so much potential and yet was easy enough to use that a non-programmer could develop useful stacks.

Roger Wagner's hyperStudio was another great product (and still exists today) but it really is a shadow of what could have been.

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markmcrobie said:
When will we be able to buy these textbooks in the UK?
Click to expand...

Once they get translated to English.

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spinedoc77 said:
How much do parents pay extra cash for things like school trips and such? I wouldn't have an issue paying something extra if it was reasonable if my child had the advantages of having their textbooks on an ipad.
Click to expand...

Nor would I but the problem that schools will have to deal with is how to get text books to student's whose parents can't afford an iPad? I live in a very well off school district but we have family's who couldn't afford an iPad, especially since many can't even afford lunch. Poorer instructs would be in an even worse situation - if more publishers move to ebooks then the hardcopies will get rarer and more expensive.

OTOH, I think Apple's dedication to education is real (and revived) and they'll come up with some sort of workable solution.
 
Why do people keep throwing out that parents won't be able to afford the ipads. The ipads would easily be a nominal cost.

paper textbook $100 x 6 books = $600/4 years of use = TCO $150/year.

electronic textbook $14.99 x 6 books = $89.94 = TCO $89.94/year.

ipad 1 16gb wifi refurbished on Apple's website $299 - apple education discount 10% - $60 subsidy from buying electronic textbook = @ $210 cost of your child's ipad. Now this is if Apple did not provide any incentives, I'll bet that Apple will translate it's tax breaks for selling to schools back to the price of the ipad, and also will be selling the ipads to schools in bulk, I'm sure that $299 will go down to at least half of that.

But even paying $210, break that down by 4 high school years = $52.5/year. Come on, that's less than the price of a school field trip! Also I believe that $210 would be deductible as a students supplies for the parent. You would also be saving the environment, and maybe even more important than all the above reasons you would be saving that poor kids back.

I just don't see many arguments against this. What apple has done is pretty incredible. yes it's self serving and purely for profit, but at least they figured out how to benefit society and make themselves a profit.
 
So the announcement is great I've been waiting for something like this for a few years now. Any idea when this will launch internationally? Also I've just graduated from high school so I missed that boat does anyone know if Apple will do something similar for higher education?
 
I can't use iBooks 2 without experiencing constant crashes on my iPad 1, especially when trying to read one of the new interactive textbooks. Same issue with the new iTunes U app:






AutoSubmitted

SysInfoCrashReporterKey
8b2f270a85eb504a06b552e2088a205e9f3fbde6
bug_type
198
description
Incident Identifier: 02F2A0AE-61D5-42D3-9E98-631ADFA8AD8C
CrashReporter Key: 8b2f270a85eb504a06b552e2088a205e9f3fbde6
Hardware Model: iPad1,1
OS Version: iPhone OS 5.0.1 (9A405)
Kernel Version: Darwin Kernel Version 11.0.0: Tue Nov 1 20:33:58 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1878.4.46~1/RELEASE_ARM_S5L8930X
Date: 2012-01-19 23:16:45 +0000
Time since snapshot: 70 ms

Free pages: 690
Wired pages: 17053
Purgeable pages: 0
Largest process: iBooks

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Name UUID Count resident pages
securityd <e31a714c227a3d1c98ef8aacd44d91ee> 151
lsd <5b380bab4f83387fb3c5c3d9de8d5e31> 143
MobileSafari <586de8c153f93939a9f42bec9d0d8bfd> 6513 (active)
iBooks <28d96a2a18dc358a8d92c88544dd2ea2> 14829 (jettisoned)
MobileMail <7064f2baf3f23db987bc8ec99855fe53> 781
atc <2271ed33ec773eeb9f381bf1baac9dee> 650
notification_pro <c02e08eb90bb3e10867523b9acf12fa6> 105
afcd <0e1b35296ee33d2baeadbeead25d4a5f> 131
afcd <0e1b35296ee33d2baeadbeead25d4a5f> 127
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absinthed.K48 <9c88bd271cb23a369a1b36c71eb97b4a> 88
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aosnotifyd <58089d732ab43bbea0aec4a6f812f446> 574
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apsd <e4b6e6e4f31e36f79815747ecbf52907> 238
fseventsd <78af02202422321885dfc85c24534b0e> 254
iapd <3ee7f82879033b4fb93b9cf1f4ecae29> 312
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rumplestiltskin said:
I was able to drop an iBooks Author book into iTunes (v10.5.2) and it sync'd properly to my iPad and opened in the just-updated iBooks2 app. No need to update.

So what is really in the update? Something that might prevent content I create (and eMail to a friend) from being sync'd with someone else's iPad through their iTunes 10.5.3?

Just wondering...

However, I do love the ability to create a smart-looking eBook sans interactivity if I wish.

BTW: Rename the iPad book you "shared" from iBooks Author with an "epub" extension (instead of the "ibook") and you may open it in Sigil or convert it with Calibre. You do lose some iBooks specificity, however, but I haven't tested exactly what yet.
Click to expand...

Your book probably didn't use any interactive elements, and was therefore a standard Epub 3 book.
 
alchemistmuffin said:
No individual student discount for iOS devices unfortunately. Discounts on Apple devices requires higher education ID (College) or letter from school and even with that, only applies to Macs.

iOS devices discounts applies to institution (Schools) buying devices in bulk.
Click to expand...

We then asked about a macbook and got the same answer.

K - 12 applied to Nothing.

So she bought two PC's. J/K
She bought the MacBook which I just got out of the shop yesterday because the hard drive went bad at about 6 months old. Warranty.

We need to teach the kids (at ANY age) and give them access to the proper learning tools.
So we paid full price!
 
grahamnp said:
How are all students supposed to cough up the money for a brand new iPad? The students who can afford an iPad probably already have one. I am not familiar with the situation in the US but I can imagine that not every school has the funds to buy one per student. The least they could do is offer the same educational discount they extend to all students who buy computers.
Click to expand...

In the long run if tablets become a standard educational tool, they can be financed or leased at a relatively low cost through the school. Some sort of insurance can also be included.

You could be talking maybe $10-15 per month per student. I understand even that is a lot for many, many people in the United States and elsewhere. But the potential benefits will justify the expense, this is a lot more than just fancy multimedia textbooks.
 
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