Apple has introduced the new version of its iBooks application that has the potential to change how students read textbooks. As more than 1.5 million educational institutions across the world are using iPads, this release focused on textbooks. Also, Apple has partners with Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and thus is going active on making this the future of textbooks. Its launch was so successful that just in the first 3 days over 350,000 textbooks were downloaded in the US. So, what’s so revolutionary about iBooks 2?

What is iBooks?

iBooks is an ebook reading application for the iPad and iPhone that lets you read books and documents in PDF or ePub formats. This is becoming the future of publishing as a number of book readers and students are using iPads for their content consumption.

There is also an iBookstore similar to to Apple appstore and is the marketplace for authors and publishers to sell their book content. The app is free for iOS users to download and Apple makes money from selling the content.

What’s new with the iBooks?

1. Highly Interactive Viewing: Apple wants to reinvent studying books, and they want books to have two way communication. In contrast, our textbooks have pages that just gives content.
2. Quizzes for textbook: Authors can now have quizzes at the end of their chapters that students can use to test their understanding. In contrast to static quizzes on physical textbooks, you can get yourself evaluated immediately.
3. Adding notes to the iBook
4. Search for definition: Users can tap any word or video to search for definitions.
5. iBook Author – This is an authoring tool for texbook authors to create interactive books. It is a WYSWIG editor
6. Expanded iBookstore with textbooks - iBookstore has now been expanded to include a separate category for textbooks. By cutting the middlemen it is possible to sell textbooks at very low cost compared to what the students buy in their campus bookstore.

Here’s a video walkthrough of iBooks