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by sendaiben
5 comments
Apple Education
Reading about the new Apple educational push, I was pretty impressed. It seems like they ‘get’ the core issues:
1. textbooks need to be interactive and appealing, and take advantage of pictures, video, and audio
2. textbooks need to be affordable
3. teachers want to make these next-generation textbooks
Their iBook author app looks extremely interesting. Interesting enough to make me look up the price of new Apple laptops…
Perhaps that was the secret agenda ^-^
From what I understand, though, the licensing agreement does not allow you to sell what you’ve created on any platform but Apple. I’m curious to see what happens when Windows 8 comes out and more arenas unfold for textbook publishers. If I were a publisher I’d be very wary of marrying myself to one platform.
I downloaded one of the free textbooks and it’s very slick, very personal and easy to use. I think this is a great strategy. They seem to be setting all the trends and everyone else is following. Look at what the original iPhone started and even as far back as the first iPod. Fast forward to the iPad now. They make new industries every couple of years.
Apple is a hardware company: their aim is to sell computers. So they produce great software that only runs on those machines…