Apple this morning showed off digital textbooks at its education event in New York.
The operating system’s familiar pinch and tapping features are also available, giving users more interaction with titles.The service, dubbed iBooks 2, will allow textbook makers to create fully interactive titles for Apple’s iPad. According to the company, users will be able to swipe across the display to open textbook pages and view movies within each chapter.
The books can also be switched between portrait mode and landscape modes to make text and images easier to interact with.
It’s the interactivity that Apple was focused on. The company says that kids will be able to see 3D images and rotate them to get a better feel for what, for example a DNA structure looks like.
commentary There’s talk that the online protests against the cybersiblings SOPA and PIPA constituted some sort of political coming of age moment for the tech industry. As if the tech moguls had “largely steered clear of lobbying and other political games in Washington” until now. Really? I love The New York Times but c’mon. This is the sort of fairy tale that sounds sweet but fails the smell test.
Silicon Valley has been looking to buy influence in Washington ever since tech companies started making serious money. Witness the sundry battles waged in the last couple of decades over a range of bread and butter issues including Internet tax breaks, the DMCA, or Internet porn laws. And let’s not forgot that not-so-insignificant 1998 dustup between the Justice Department and Microsoft over antitrust.
