Apple Introduces Tools to (Someday) Supplant Print Textbooks

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News

9:02 p.m. | Updated

Apple wants students to stop lugging around backpacks full of heavy textbooks and to switch to the iPad instead.

On Thursday the company introduced three free pieces of software revolving around education. It released iBooks 2, a new version of its electronic bookstore, where students can now download textbooks; iBooks Author, a Macintosh program for creating textbooks and other books; and iTunes U, an app for instructors to create digital curriculums and share course materials with students.

Digital textbooks made for iBooks can display interactive diagrams, audio and video. The iBooks Author app includes templates made by Apple, which publishers and authors can customize to suit their content.

Apple said electronic high school textbooks from its initial publishing partners, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, would cost $15 or less. That is much cheaper than print textbooks, some of which can cost over $100.

“Education is deep in our DNA and it has been from the very beginning,” said Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, at the event at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Textbooks are a fat target for the technology industry. Sales of electronic textbooks accounted for only 2.8 percent of the $8 billion domestic textbook market in 2010, according to Forrester Research. For publishers, the new partnerships with Apple were more likely motivated by a desire to experiment with technology than to earn huge profits, said Sarah Rotman-Epps, a Forrester analyst.

Though the possibilities of Apple’s new publishing software and the iPad seemed to excite publishers, even those who are working on iPad textbooks said it would take time for the technology to change how most textbooks are purchased. First, there is the obvious challenge of finding the money for schools to buy iPads, which start at $500 each in stores.

“It’s a very high and expensive hurdle to overcome,” said Josef Blumenfeld, a senior vice president at one publisher working with Apple, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Mr. Blumenfeld said Houghton had seen high engagement levels when students used an educational app for the iPad that it had already published, and that it expected electronic textbooks to have the same effect.

He said, though, that schools would first have to become comfortable with the idea of paying for rights to iPad textbooks for new students every school year, rather than paying a one-time fee of, say, $60 for a printed textbook that lasts five or six years. Publishers, too, will have to get used to the idea of Apple taking a 30 percent commission on sales. But Mr. Blumenfeld predicted that iPad textbooks would not hurt Harcourt’s profits because they would not have printing, shipping and other costs.

By most estimates, Apple has not captured as much of the electronic book market with the iPad and its iBookstore as its chief rival in the business, Amazon, has with the Kindle e-reader. But Amazon has been less successful in the education market.

Amazon in 2009 announced plans to target the textbook publishing industry with the Kindle DX, a larger version of its e-reader. But Amazon failed to make a dent in the market and did not impress students. At Princeton, which offered a Kindle DX pilot program, students complained about the device’s sluggishness and limited interactivity, according to the university’s student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. Meanwhile Apple has a deep and longstanding connection with the education market.

Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies at Abilene Christian University, led a pilot program where students and teachers used iPhones in the classroom. He called Apple’s new education tools “revolutionary,” because they give users the ability to create and share books easily.

“This is something we’ve been dreaming about for years,” he said. But Jill Ambrose, chief marketing officer at CourseSmart, which offers digital textbooks for the iPad, iPhone and Android devices, said it was a potential problem that Apple’s textbooks would be exclusively available for Apple products.

“Based on the fact that you have to mandate a specific device, that’s going to be difficult for school districts to decide students are going to take their strained budgets to purchase these devices,” she said.