iAuthor for iBook: Apple unveils tools to supplant textbooks

Apple wants students to stop lugging around backpacks full of heavy textbooks and to switch to the iPad instead.

Apple wants students to stop lugging around backpacks full of heavy textbooks and to switch to the iPad instead.

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On Thursday the company introduced three free pieces of software revolving around education. It released iBooks 2, a new version of its electronic bookstore, where students can now download textbooks; iBooks Author, a Macintosh program for creating textbooks and other books; and iTunes U, an app for instructors to create digital curriculums and share course materials with students.

Digital textbooks made for iBooks can display interactive diagrams, audio and video. The iBooks Author app includes templates made by Apple, which publishers and authors can customise to suit their content.

Apple said electronic high school textbooks from its initial publishing partners, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, would cost $15 or less. That is much cheaper than print textbooks, some of which can cost over $100.

"Education is deep in our DNA and it has been from the very beginning," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's senior vice-president of marketing, at the event at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York. - NYT