Today Apple announced their new application called iBooks 2, which is really just an awesome refresh on their existing iBooks app.

What's so cool about this update?

First off, basically everyone can be an author.

Image: Mashable

Any 'ol Joe Smo will be able to write and publish iBooks to the iBookstore. My dream of becoming a published author will come true soon!

More importantly though, iBooks will (hopefully) revolutionize education.

Image: Mashable

These iBooks, digital textbooks, give the reader an interactive experience with their coursework. Apple's iBooks 2 app allows users to take notes, create study cards, search within text, and take quizzes, among other features that coincide with the traditional education process.

It will also pair with the iTunes U program with launched about four years ago that has been successfully integrated into 1,000 universities and is the largest catalog for free educational content.

Image: Mashable

iTunes U will help teachers reinvent their curriculum. Complete with audio and visual (video and text), teachers will be able to create complete, online curriculum and they can monitor their courses all from an iPad. This system will allow for course outlines with a complete syllabus, the addition of office hours and assignment postings (with notifications for students when new ones are added).

Apple announced that popular publishers, such as McGraw-Hill Cos., Pearson PLC and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, will make textbooks available for high school students first then expects to expand to every subject and grade level. The expected cost of these books is $14.99 or less.

This push by a giant like Apple is huge the mainstreaming of digital resources in education. This is going to force educational systems, including higher education, to consider the cost effective move to going digital. Sure the cost of an iPad is high, but does buying 6 or more expensive textbooks per student versus one iPad and "cheap" ebooks change the game?

How about college students? How much less loan debt would college students have if they were no longer buying multiple $200 and $300 textbooks a semester? This will also take a huge weight off universities for buying back, storing, and dealing with outdated textbooks.

To date, six universities have access to the new iTunes U and iBooks and have created over 100 full, online courses... all of it on iTunes U and all of it for free!

How exciting is that?!

Now that we understand how great this is but let's get to the point, how much will this update cost?

Nothing. No cost. That's right, it's free! Talk about changing the face of textbooks. By offering this application for free, Apple is almost guaranteeing widespread use over their cited 1.5 million iPads being used in education today.


This could also be the first step towards the Social Textbook that I presented as part of a graduate project.

A few months back I published a project called Social Textbooks, which are interactive and collaborative textbooks. This type of textbook would allow students to collaborating outside the classroom to discuss their reading material, which would cut down on in-class time that would have been spent clarifying ideas and themes from the assigned reading. Basically, if I didn't understand passage "X" from Chapter 2 of this week's reading, I could post a thread within my digital social textbook and my classmates or instructor could answer. Along with these collaboration attributes, these digital textbooks would consist of high resolution images, interactive graphs and maps, and wiki style linking.

Maybe me and my ideas should join the Apple team?

How do you feel about the reinvention of textbooks and the future of education?