Apple’s historically high first quarter numbers posted Tuesday are the talk of Wall Street, but the company is also shaking-up the textbook publishing industry with its newest app — iBooks 2 for the iPad.
The new app — unveiled on January 19 — seeks to offer readers both increased portability, with full textbooks downloadable on the ultra-thin iPad, and a bevvy of added interactive features, including 3D animations, videos, music, even customizable flashcards. The books are also far cheaper than the usual textbook, beginning at $14.99 through Apple’s iBookstore.
So far, it’s a hit: Over 350,000 copies of textbooks were downloaded from the iBookstore in the first three days, according to tracking firm Global Equities Research, via All Things D.
Although it’s unclear how many of these were paid downloads at the standard $14.99 (as opposed to downloads of the free sample book E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth), the fact that the store has seen so much interest in such a short time, with so few titles so far — just seven textbooks are available at present — would seem to bode quite well for Apple’s educational ambitions, to say the least.
Five of those titles are from leading textbook publisher McGraw Hill Education. That’s not exactly a surprise, given that the company is projected to be the second largest educational publisher in the world by revenue after it spins off from the parent McGraw Hill later this year, according to Publisher’s Weekly.
“We welcome Apple as another valued partner in education as we build on our record of expanding innovative digital products,” said Vineet Madan, senior VP of New Ventures and Strategic Services at McGraw-Hill Education, in an interview with TPM. “We’re writing a new chapter in the move from textbooks to personalized learning platforms.”
Indeed, McGraw Hill has been a longtime partner of Apple — with the company’s CEO even letting the news of the original iPad slip ahead of its official launch in April 2010.
“More than 50 of our Higher Education and Professional titles have been available on the iPad since 2010,” Madan said. “McGraw-Hill has also released more than 170 medical and test-prep iPhone applications in partnership with leading iPhone developers.”
But up until now, the company has been unable to provide the kinds of rich multimedia educational experiences it was working on through Apple’s iBookstore.
“The previous version of iBooks didn’t allow for the kinds of things we wanted to do,” Madan said. “But iBooks 2 has it all: Videos, music, touch. Sheet music, for example, will now be synchronized with you, automatically moving through the piece, as you practice your instrument.”
Madan said that McGraw hill had actually been developing the kinds of interactive experiences it wanted to bring students on the iPad long before iBooks 2 was announced through its partnership with Inkling, a startup company founded in San Francisco in late 2009 to re-invent the textbook for the tablet age.
That partnership was announced in August 2010, when McGraw Hill invested an undisclosed amount in Inkling as part of its first major round of funding in exchange for having its content be adapted using Inkling’s interactive media tools.
Since then, McGraw Hill and Pearson have invested even more in Inkling, and the company is on the hook to produce iPad versions of the top 100 titles from McGraw Hill Education’s undergraduate library, according to Xconomy.
“We’ve already been doing some incredible things with Inkling and you’re only going to see more in the next year,” Madan told TPM.
There’s already a number of titles from McGraw available for the iPad on Inkling’s own store, but they start at much higher prices than what is being offered through Apple’s iBookstore, $69.99 according to GigaOm, which is closer to the wallet-emptying prices students are accustomed to paying for brand new textbooks these days.
Madan said that the company expects to at least “double” its “programming options” by the end of 2012.
Still, the big x-factor remains just how big of a cut Apple is taking from McGraw Hill and other publishers when it comes to the partnership between the companies.
Apple famously takes 30 percent of all sales in the regular iBookstore, though publishers get 100 percent if they bring in the customer from their website.
But it remains to be seen if Apple treats educational publishing in the same way — a lucrative market worth at least $800 million according to WikInevest.
McGraw Hill Ed’s Madan remained tight-lipped when asked about that:
“We haven’t disclosed details of the revenue sharing agreement but we are very excited about the prospects of working with Apple,” Madan told TPM.
Plus, the new iBooks Author software, released at the same time as iBooks 2, allows anyone with a Mac computer to create their own interactive volumes, leading Matthew Yglesias to call for a free textbook revolution. Apple’s iAuthor terms and conditions allow newly created books to be distributed freely throughout the iBookstore, but mandates that those looking to sell their books only do so through Apple, entering into a separate written agreement with the company.
And asked what separates McGraw Hill’s latest foray into interactive textbooks from previous, ill-fated CD-ROM textbooks, which were supposed to revolutionize the industry in the 1990s by offering some of the same rich multimedia features, Madan offered a completely unfazed endorsement of the new tablet textbooks.
“We’ve always been pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in educational publishing and learning at McGraw,” Madan told TPM. “Sometimes, that involved putting out products before the market was mature enough to embrace and understand them. But remember, CD ROMs, even though they were more portable than textbooks, were still relatively bulky, required lots of physical copies, and took a fairly long time to boot up. The iPad does away with all of that.”
Carl Franzen
Carl Franzen is TPM Idea Lab's tech reporter. He used to work for The Daily, AOL and The Atlantic Wire (though not simultaneously, thankfully). He's never met a button that didn't need to be pressed. He can be reached at carl@talkingpointsmemo.com.
I'd be happier to see textbooks (especially for basic courses) be released on an open platform, under Creative Commons licensing.
Well the good news here is that this could do away with Texas having so much control of text book content. And for students no more lugging books around in a backpack.
jsfox I am here to tell you that the notion that Texas "controls" textbook content has been grossly exaggerated for the last 10 years. When Texas wants textbooks, publishers make Texas versions—customizations—from the national versions. Texas' standards or its specific requirements have no bearing on the books that are offered to students from other states. It's time to lay this myth to rest.
@tinisoli @jsfox
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic...
"The changes, which were preliminarily approved last week by the Texas board of education and are expected to be given final approval in May, will reach deeply into Texas history classrooms, defining what textbooks must include and what teachers must cover. The curriculum plays down the role of Thomas Jefferson among the founding fathers, questions the separation of church and state, and claims that the U.S. government was infiltrated by Communists during the Cold War.
Because the Texas textbook market is so large, books assigned to the state's 4.7 million students often rocket to the top of the market, decreasing costs for other school districts and leading them to buy the same materials."
donarb This is bunk. Again, Texas can get books it likes and other states and open-territory markets can get books they like. Customization allows small states and open-territory areas to either get their own editions or get the "national" edition instead of getting Texas' edition. Ask Arne Duncan.
donarb@jsfox Well quoted, donarb. And absolutely not bunk.
@tinisoli Your argument rests on the flawed assumption that there is a national edition.
I still read books the old-fashioned way
MyLastSerenade I do both.
LestatdelcMyLastSerenade Damn luddites ;)
MyLastSerenade On cuneiform tablets?
Flying SquidMyLastSerenade Tablets, hell! Stele!
MyLastSerenade Just got a Kindle touch for my birthday. It plays MP3s, holds about 3,000 books, remembers where you stopped, and even has a built-in dictionary and can take notes. E-ink is probably the closest to you'll get to real paper.
Pros: With the Kindle, you can read more quickly, adjust the font size, and never have to worry about a book going out of print.
Cons: I don't know about the market for trading books that I've read on the Kindle, and a lot of books I pick up at my library book-sale twice a year (avg. cost = $2).
I'm still reading using both, but I do really like the Kindle.
MyLastSerenade I don't know more than two ways to read - normal and fast reading. I just read the normal way, whether I'm reading a newspaper, textbook, magazine, e-reader, or billboard. The true old fashioned way to get reading material doesn't include paper back books, only hard bound. I use a Nook for most of my entertainment reading, and have purchased about 220 books from Barnes and Noble since getting the Nook about 15 months ago. For the past month I have been getting my entertainment reading books by using eBookFling, a website that acts as middleman for lending the small percentage of Nook and Kindle books that are lendable. Meanwhile the price of best seller ebooks has gone from about $10 to about #17 each. Within another year ebooks will cost about what hardbound books cost, if not more.
I know a couple more books were available I think there abou 9 now and 600.000 copies of iBooks author were downloaded so if everyone one who downloaded it would be great there would be as many books as apps and there are 200,000 developers so I expect that it would it have a lot of mommentum and apple reported nearly 2 million iPads are used in education and with the iPad 3 1 or 2 months away and the iPad 1s being sold for 99 and iPad 2s being sold for 299 and iPad 3s being sold for 499 they might put the iPad 1 back or just sell it refurbished and its realistic because they have 3 iPhones why not 3 iPads I think it would be a big discuss and they can afford i499 because most schools have laptops which are 800 upwards and education is what America spends most in nearly 5000 per student per year and when the government gets in it we may get some progress for long term
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