Apple iBooks textbooks set at $14.99 or less

iBooks Author Revealed

iBooks 2 revealed with texbooks

http://www.slashgear.com/ipad-at-the-head-of-apples-education-event-in-nyc-19209918/

Thanks for joining us for today’s event – don’t forget to let us know what you think of Apple’s new software!

All the news from this morning is there too: http://www.slashgear.com/

We’re going to go and try all the new software; look for our hands-on reports on the SlashGear frontpage

That’s a wrap, they’re inviting us to come try out the new tools

“We’re proud of what the teams have done”

“All of us at Apple know you can empower people through learning – tech has a role to play in that”

iBooks – reinventing the textbook
iBooks Author – making it simple and free to create interactive books
iTunes U – free and simple courses for everyone

“We hope educators will look on today’s announcements with the same fondness as they do our earlier work”

Wheels for the Mind too

Mentioning the Kids Can’t Wait program and the ACOT study about student engagement

The company “exists at the intersection of liberal arts and tech – never has that been more evident than today and our investment in education”

“Apple in Education”

Phil is back, going over the key points from today

Free download from the App Store today!

For the moment, it’s been universities that have used iTunes U, but K-12 schools can now register, and begin delivering courses today in 123 countries

Over 100 courses available to begin with. The iTunes U app is free, as are the courses

Now talking about all the schools that are participating, including Duke, Yale, Open University, UCLA, etc

Giving us a summary: full courses with multimedia documentation; syllabus and assignments; teacher posts; iBooks notes integrated

Eddy Cue back on stage now

You can enroll into classes through the iTunes U app, plus leave feedback on classes

Apple’s making it VERY easy to spend money on education

Materials tab shows any related course content, so videos, texts, audio, other documents, plus links to other apps with one-tap downloads

Similar to what we saw in the interactive textbooks

The Notes tab shows any of the highlights and notes you’ve made through the course

Choice of downloading videos or streaming them

Automatic task list showing outstanding homework – automatically crosses it off as you submit

You just tap through and get your latest assignment for class

Teachers can post messages to their class in the Posts section, and set assignments. These automatically appear in iBooks in a new section

They can all be customized by the course administrator

Shows who the teacher is, syllabus details, office hours and credits, plus tabs to go to information, posts, materials, notes

Showing an online course in Core Concepts in Chemistry from Duke

“If you’ve used iBooks, iTunes U will feel familiar”

Jeff Robbin on-stage. Bookshelf of titles on the iPad

Showing a demo

All-new iTunes U, now gets a dedicated app for delivering content direct to iPad

Now adding full online courses to iTunes U

There have been 700m iTunes U downloads, primarily for use in lectures. Showing us a physics demo from an MIT lecture

“To help teachers reinvent the curriculum”

It’s the world’s largest catalog of free education content

Talking about iTunes U – it’s content delivery for colleges and universities “around the world” to deliver content to iPad, iPhone, iPod touch

Eddy Cue on-stage

“That’s reinventing the textbook, and it’s the first thing to tell you about today”

Video over, Phil back on-stage

“With interactive textbooks, that kind of connection will be happening on a daily basis”

Going through various case-studies, how difficult students can be engaged if you bring technology into the classroom

Different textbook publishers and superintendents talking about how digital textbooks will help. “They will change the landscape of education”

“Children need to be engaged”

That’s where the money comes from of course, plus Apple’s cut of the textbook costs. Nothing on how much that will be, so we’re assuming the same 30% as usual

Though there’s no talk of whether kids will be able to afford an iPad in the first place

Pointing out, again, that this is free

“Making interactive books, until now, has been complex, so we made it easy with iBooks Author”

Demonstrating how the digital notes are captured and then converted into cards

“You can do things you can’t do with a static textbook – fluid animation and graphics, better notetaking”

The books do look brilliant, especially when you consider how easy to make they are

“The iPad makes learning more engaging” – showing kids using iPads

“That just prepares them for something in the past”

Heavy textbooks, students just don’t bother bringing to class. “Kids don’t need to use the same tools they did in the 1950s”

How “outdated textbooks” makes it difficult. Paper textbooks don’t keep up with the latest information – it’s outdated as soon as it’s printed

Teachers, talking about how they can use the new tech, how they love teaching

More video demo…

They’re free, but future chapters will be “a very reasonable price”

Life on Earth is exclusive to iBooks – the first two chapters are out today

Sorry, E.O. Wilson

Apple has also been working with the W.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation

DK Publishing has four books for today: Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life, Natural History Insects, Natural History Animals, My First ABC – “they’re amazing”

“They’re incredible: beautiful and interactive”

That’s from Pearson. Now McGraw Hill, which has Algebra 1, Bio, Chemistry, Geometry and Physics available today

The books on offer cover the curriculum of more than 4m high school students in the US

Bio and High School Science available from today, with others to follow

They’ll be providing 90% of the textbooks initially

Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are the first partners

There’s a difference, in that kids will buy their own books not schools, but they’ll also get to keep it, and the author can keep it up to date

For textbooks from Apple’s starting line-up of partners

Highschool textbooks will be $14.99 or less

“We wanted to get started on textbooks early”

That’s pretty incredible!

It’s in the Mac App Store today, a free download

iBooks Author will be free!

“Customizable templates, multitouch widgets, photos and video, HMTL5 support, and simple publishing”

Talking through what we’ve just seen – “anyone can create interactive books”

Roger’s off, Phil is back

“I hope you find it all as empowering and inspiring as we do”

Everything just added, all the interactive elements and movies, are in place and rendered properly in the preview, looks great!

Using iTunes Producer to publish. You can preview it on the iPad – transfers over to your iPad so you can play with the ebook first, over a wired connection

When you’ve done creating, you can publish straight into the iBookstore

“This is a miracle in time saving” Roger says

You highlight a word you want to put a definition in for, click a button, and it’s added to the glossary; another click and you can add the text. You can drag/drop multimedia too

iBooks Author has “the world’s best glossary tool” apparently

Anything you create just drags/drops in

“If you can write in JavaScript and HTML, you can create your own, custom widgets”

You can load a Keynote presentation in just as you would photos – drag and drop, and it automatically formats as an interactive widget

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we’d built in Keynote and iBooks 2?” he asks

Basically consists of widgets – you can drop a gallery widget in, and it’s automatically created. “What you see, is what you get” he says

The “cool interactive stuff” is put in via the toolbar at the top: it shows all the interactivity that the app can handle

Some applause for all this

It’s automatically laid-out correctly, with sections and headers. Images can be dropped in, with text reflow

You could even write the book itself, all within the app, but you can also drag in a Word file

You can drag over any images or video into the new book, and they’re automatically added.

There’s a column of pages down the left, and a preview of the current page in the middle

Comes preloaded with templates – they have junk text and stock photos. You can click on one to edit it

“Creating books is, traditionally, really hard. We think we’ve changed that with iBooks Author”

Bringing Roger back on stage for another demo

It’s a Mac OS X app, “you can create not just a textbook, but any ebook”

“What you haven’t seen is how easy it can be to create these books”

Now, iBooks Author

iBooks 2 is a free download from the App Store, released today

“I hope you can see how gorgeous these textbooks can be, with videos and photos, how fluid navigation is. It’s an amazing tool for students”

Applause, as Phil comes back on-stage

“That’s iBooks 2″

Shows you a preview of the content for each book, one-click downloads. “You can get a free sample” and redownload existing purchases.

Now showing the updated iBookstore, with a new category for textbooks

“There hasn’t been a textbook ever that made it this easy to be a student” he reckons

They look just like regular 5 x 3 study cards, navigated by swipes. Answers on the back, you can flip them over to see if you got it right. Shuffle the order for testing.

It’s called “My Notes”, accessed from the toolbar. Can automatically turn them into study cards

All the notes are pulled out into a separate notepad document

There’s support for adding notes, swiping to highlight sections, change the color for easier locating later

Other questions show a map, and you have to tap the correct location. “Bottom line, it’s immediate feedback” about your learning

There can be quiz questions embedded along the way, showing multiple choice options with pictures to choose from

More smooth swiping

Gallery supports pinch-gestures

Page numbers are consistent, so that whole classes can easily navigate to the same position

The glossary includes pictures and video of its own, it’s all smooth and fast

Auto-complete in glossary search, takes you to the relevant page when you tap

Pinch-in takes you to the contents, tapping words pulls up a glossary. Index links to navigate through the book – “it’s so much better than a regular paper glossary”

In portrait, text dominates, pictures are smaller

“These books have two different reading experiences, I can pick which suits me best”

All this has been in landscape orientation so far, but flipping to portrait adjusts it automatically to suit reading as the focus

Now showing an e-textbook about insects – can tap on an image to get a larger diagram of its component parts

You can pinch and drag and swipe through animations and video, pull virtual sliders across to navigate through

“The authors have complete freedom to make interactive experiences”

Animations all over the place, pinch-zooming into photos that triggers 3D animations too

“I think you can see immediately, these are gorgeous, gorgeous books – no printed book can compete”

Swiping left/right moves through chapters from the homescreen, swiping down goes to the individual chapters themselves

Intro movie plays automatically, though you can bypass it. Multitouch gestures to navigate through content

Showing a bookstand of titles, picking out an individual biology book

Roger Rosner on stage to demo

“They’re amazing: graphic, fun and engaging.” Going to show a demo now.

Phil believes kids are going to love to learn with them

It’s a “new textbook experience for iPad”

iPad, however, addresses all of those problems, with iBooks 2

The content, though, is great – companies are working hard to keep the content updated. But they just can’t get that to everyone as quickly as they’d like

How do they stack up? They’re not that portable, not durable, not interactive, not searchable and not current

Yet the content is amazing

However, it’s not hard to see that the textbook isn’t always the ideal learning tool: it’s heavy, cumbersome, expensive

“First, we’re reinventing the textbook. We love books!”

“It’s starting to take off, but we want to make it easier. Today we’re going to tell you about two ways we’re going to do that”

The iBookstore is packed with books. And there are over 1.5m iPads being used in educational programs

Listing some of the options: Virtual Rome, Solar System, etc

Currently there are over 20,000 education apps, specific to iPad

Students get excited at learning using an iPad – Phil points out it was top of many teens’ wish-lists in the past holidays

“No single individual or company can fix it”

“There’s a lot discussed about where education is going wrong, and we’re trying to figure out what Apple can do to help. One area is engagement.”

Phil back on stage

“We failed them” says one teacher, when students don’t graduate

Most classrooms don’t have the textbooks that they need, never mind the technology

Students commonly have issues with reading and writing, and engagement is low

Discussing class sizes – over 40 students per class – “it’s in the dark ages”

Video starting, talking-heads with teachers

The US isn’t at the top of industrialized nations for higher-eduction. It’s at 23rd in science globally. “We want to do better”

Freshmen have only 70% chance of graduating. Even if you work hard and graduate, you might not be prepared to compete in a global environment.

There are challenges in education, though, and they’re profound. If you’re a highschool student in the US, it isn’t easy.”

Kids are getting smarter, thanks to tablets.

“We’re proud to help students learn, but something profound is happening, students are being introduced to iPad”

“This is a special event for Apple, it’s about education. Education is deep in our DNA – we bring the same energy and passion we put into every produce we make, into our education business as well.”

Plenty of applause, Phil says “thank you and good morning everyone”

Phil Schiller on-stage

Lights going down…

Usual setup here: big screen with the Apple logo, and a table with a couple iMacs and some iPads on it

We’re being asked to silence our devices

It’s definitely a smaller crowd than usual Apple events

We’re in!

Ten minutes to go…

Are you up to speed on the latest Apple rumors about today’s event?

http://www.slashgear.com/apple-e-textbook-project-code-named-bliss-inspired-by-al-gores-our-choice-18209803/

We’re inside the building now, but still waiting to be seated

We are starting in a little less than an hour.