AppleAn image from Apple’s invitation to a press event next week.The company sent invitations to reporters on Wednesday for an event at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on Jan. 19. The background image looks like a chalkboard with an outline of the city skyline and the Apple logo scrawled on it. “Join us for an education announcement in the Big Apple,” the invitation read.
The event will showcase a new push by Apple into the digital textbook business, but will not feature any new devices, according to a person close to the company who did not want to be identified talking about it before it occurred.
Talk of such a move by Apple has been bubbling since a biography of Apple’s late chief executive, Steve Jobs, came out in October. In that book by Walter Isaacson, Mr. Jobs told him that he wanted to transform the textbook market by hiring prominent textbook writers to create electronic versions of them for the iPad. Mr. Jobs told the author that he believed Apple could get around state certification processes for textbooks by making them free.