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 ^-^

Apple is a hardware company: their aim is to sell computers. So they produce great software that only runs on those machines…

Yep. It seems to be working out quite well for them 🙂

I am actually very interested in their new authoring software. Creating my own course books would be very satisfying, from a personal and professional standpoint.

27 Jan 2012, 4:19pm
by Ryan Hagglund

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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.

Hey Ryan

That is interesting. Do you mean that Apple is going to claim the rights to the content? So you would not be allowed to reformat your work and sell it through a different channel?

That does seem unnecessarily restrictive.

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.

 

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