Apple held its education event in New York today and the company has announced its new initiative iBooks 2. The new program has
been hailed as "a new textbook experience for iPad" and the proposal expect to 'reinvent the textbook'. Apple also revealed that currently 1.5 million iPads are being used for educational purposes. It also said that there are about 20,000 dedicated apps for this purpose.
For the new venture, Apple is collaborating with various textbook publishers such as McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson. Apple's collection of textbooks would include Pearson's High School Science, Biology and DK's Natural History Insects. You can download iBooks 2 from the Apple App Store and the app is available for free. Most of the textbooks are priced at $14.99 or less.
Introducing new project, Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said, "We try to bring the same energy and passion we’ve put into every product we make into our education business as well,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing. “There’s something really profound starting to happen, it’s remarkable. We’re seeing that, as students are introduced to iPad, remarkable things are happening.”
Apple is also launching a new OS X application, iBooks Author. The app will be used for creating new textbooks for iBooks 2.