The rumor is that before he died, Steve Jobs dreamed of bringing textbooks to iPad. He actually saw iPad as a tool for kids (which also explains the lack of porn apps for iPad). However, the latest announcement related to eBooks may be also seen simply as another inventive way for Apple to boost sales of their hardware (iPad and Mac) and to earn even more as middleman selling content (eBooks). It also can be seen as a way to prevent the avalanche of “books published as apps” that pollute iOS app store and make finding apps of interest obfuscated by stupid “books published as apps”.

So, the big Apple announcement about eBooks, that touts to revolutionise eBooks is about 2 things: iBooks Author app for Mac (that I am not reviewing here) and iBooks version 2 to display the new kind of eBooks. I am reviewing here iBooks 2 together with 2 textbooks – one free (about Ecology made by green commies) and one commercial (Biology Textbook).

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Right now the choice of textbooks is not big and consists of merely 8 items (available only at iTunes USA).

But you can also buy non-textbook eBooks in new multimedia/interactive format, including this one:

Generally these new eBooks consist of text and thumb images that lead to interactive and multimedia content (here: on the left side).

The “multimedia and interactive” content ranges from static (albeit high resolution) images like this:

to interactive presentations where interaction means “tapping various places to get more info.”

There are 3D models that can be rotated.

As usual in iBooks, users can highlight text.

But users can also memorize material with use of cards with questions and answers.

 

There are also multiple choice questions.

(BTW: note there that since many organisms didn’t leave fossils there might be aliens living once on our planet indeed!)

As you can see, these new eBooks are essentially mini-websites compressed into Apple-specific ZIP file and are not apps. That’s why some kinds of education like for example language learning, might still be better handled by apps rather than by this new kind of eBooks (I can imagine that e.g. apps with speech recognition could learn pronunciation of foreign languages, etc).

Yes, this is not some kind of revolutionary invention and Apple’s iBooks store didn’t get much traction by now, mainly because Amazon’s Kindle is available on all devices and not just on Amazon’s own Kindle devices, and Apple’s iBooks are “Apple devices only”. However I think that by going to schools and offering eBooks and iPad devices at discount prices, Apple could achieve some breakthrough.

I don’t know much about the free iBooks Author app for Mac but from what I have heard Apple explicitly forbids creation of eBooks for non-Apple platforms with it, so anyway, once again Apple-haters will have food for anti-Apple propaganda. One can criticise Apple for being closed but the matter of fact is that standards for eBooks are developing slowly and are fragmented: e.g. Kindle devices can’t read ePub with Adobe DRM but only DRM-free ePub format. Apple, by fostering this new interactive albeit proprietary eBook format, may in fact advance the whole eBook industry.

Conclusion: I’m not very impressed with this iBooks 2 “interactive, multimedia” eBooks but let’s say it’s a good first effort and there is room for improvement. Furthermore this new technology from Apple may spawn other companies like Amazon to also release interactive multimedia eBook formats.

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