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.

Apple's new textbook offerings in the iBookstore.

As with traditional textbooks, students can easily mark up titles from the iPad. Apple showed how kids can highlight text and add a note to a page. All those notes can then be combined to make study cards. Those cards, which are basically virtual 3-by-5-inch cards, let students put a topic on one side and the definition on the other, similar to flash cards.

Apple has already formed partnerships with a host of major textbook makers, including Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. That’s important. According to Apple, those companies are responsible for 90 percent of all textbooks in the U.S.

A look atApple iBooks Author Demo & TextBooks Store Launch at Apple's NYC event.

To spur people to develop textbooks, Apple has launched a new application. The application includes templates to quickly create books, but users can also drag and drop images and video into the title. To add text, Apple lets users drag and drop a Word file from Finder into a chapter. The application then automatically creates sections and headers. Dubbed iBooks Author, the free Mac OS X application lets authors create both textbooks and books.

So, where can the textbooks be found? According to Apple, iBooks 2 is an application that’s downloaded from the App Store to the iPad for free. The textbooks themselves are priced at $14.99 or less, Apple says, and once purchased, the textbooks can be redownloaded at no additional charge. A textbook section has also been added to the iBooks store.

Apple’s iBooks 2 is available starting today. Textbooks focusing on science, math, and other disciplines are currently being offered.

Apple Education Event | iBooks 2 TextBooks iBooksVideo :

by Charles Cooper January 19, 2012 9:06 AM PST

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.

But you could find one coming of age story in the 24-hour online protest: Wikipedia. When he announced that Wikipedia would go dark for a day as part of a planned protest, founder Jimmy Wales made a bet on the political potential of crowdsourcing. He turned out to be right.

A day before turning off the lights, Wales slammed what he described to CNN as a “very badly written” law, a piece of legislation that he likened to one used in China. “I don’t think that’s the right way the U.S. needs to go in taking a leadership role on the Internet.”

And so Wikipedia set out to organize an inchoate movement with no easily-defined leader. A big ambition akin to herding cats. But the early results suggest that Wales made the right gamble. The Wikimedia Foundation disclosed on Thursday that more than 8 million U.S. readers looked up their Congressional representatives through Wikipedia. Most of the rest of us suffered in silence. Yes, we managed without access to Wikipedia for a day but it wasn’t fun. In fact, it was a big inconvenience for millions of people around the world who have come to rely upon the online dictionary, its gazillions of links and seemingly infinite number of community-curated topics. You could nod sympathetically as one wag tweeted: “Please don’t ask me anything until Wikipedia is back up.”

Now that it is back up, Wikipedia sent a signal that this might be the start of something bigger–an understandable ambition given its surprising–well, maybe not so surprising–success. “More than 162 million people saw our message asking if you could imagine a world without free knowledge,” the organization wrote in a post earlier today. “You said no. You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. Your voice was loud and strong. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet.”

It obviously wasn’t a one-man show. Wikipedia was part of a bigger Internet protest (For example, Google’s online petition received 4.5 million signatures.) And the nascent movement could claim immediate results with eight lawmakers withdrawing their support for the bills–including a couple of co-sponsors–Marco Rubio from Florida and Roy Blunt from Missouri. By any measure, it was an extraordinary demonstration of muscle-flexing.

Related video:

Ep. 106: SOPA blacks out the Web

Where would you find a four-wheeled smart phone, a tiny futuristic tank and a robotic mobility scooter straight from the pages of a manga comic?

That’s right — the Tokyo Motor Show. We’re looking East as we cast a wry eye on some of the most outlandish concept cars ever devised.

Japan’s neon-drenched capital city has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to dreaming up new gadgets and gizmos. But the engineers at Honda and Toyota have outdone themselves with their new car designs — which may or may not be heading to a showroom near you.

Visitors to the Tokyo Motor Show could be forgiven for thinking they’d somehow been teleported into a dystopian alternative universe where cars have evolved into sentient beings who’ll guide you around the city of the future, using blank-eyed holographic avatars in nurses’ uniforms.

Or maybe this universe will be populated by manga girls who glide around on bikes resembling a cross between Judge Dredd’s Lawmaster and a mobility scooter. Either way, it seems the car industry is keen to forget its current problems and focus on what we’ll all be driving tomorrow. So we thought we’d bring you the top five craziest concepts from the Tokyo Motor Show.

Highlights include the Toyota Fun-Vii, a car covered with LED panels you can customise with your smart phone; the Honda Micro Commuter, a battery-powered car that aims to give worn-out salary men a new lease of life; and the Kobot, a transforming smart phone-operated scooter. But which will take the top spot in our list of craziest concepts? Click play to find out.

Related Video :

Which of these concept cars would you most like to drive? TOYOTA Fun-Vii – 42nd Tokyo Motor Show 2011
TOYOTA Fun-Vii image movie introduced at 2011 Tokyo Motor Show Toyota Global Website: www.toyota-global.com Tokyo Motor Show

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LAS VEGAS–Nearly hidden away at CES was a $149 Sony SmartWatch (due in March) that doubles as a Bluetooth command center for Android phones.

The dust and splash proof SmartWatch is essentially the same story. The updated version is sleeker in appearance (and about 0.3-inches thick), has an accelerometer, can vibrate, and will launch with a colorful swatch of wristband accessories. A black wristband and wristband adapter is included.

This Android™ watch keeps you discreetly updated & your hands free. You can do many things through the techie timepiece , check out social media sites such as Facebook™ and Twitter posts. Catch up on tweets, texts and e-mail. See who’s calling, a pop-up caller id prompt appears during incoming calls (allowing you to accept or deny). Or escape with some tunes. Discover SmartWatch. An Android™ watch with a scratch & splash-proof multi-touch display. Clip it on. Wear it with any 0.78′ wristband. Enjoy your favorite SmartWatch apps. It’s up to you.

Featuring brushed chrome edges, the 1.3-inch OLED (65k color) touch screen features Bluetooth 3.0 and is compatible with Android phones from Sony, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, and others. You may remember its predecessor, the Live View accessory that Sony Ericsson released in late 2010.

The experience with the device, it was responsive and attractive. SmartWatch features an easy-to-use, ultra-responsive touch display. Finding your way around SmartWatch couldn’t be easier. Your world’s just a tap, swipe or press away. Hitting a button displays the time, which you can then tap to reach the other apps. An option for continuous time display would probably cause the battery life to suffer greatly.

SmartWatch; Touch your world and stay discreetly updated with smartwatch for Android™

Details on battery life are vague, but with low usage, it will last a week. Moderate use turns the battery life figure into three or four days, while obsessive compulsives might need to recharge via its USB connection once a day.

Want to do more with your SmartWatch? Download compatible applications on Android Market™. And customize your SmartWatch to make it exclusively yours. An easy-to-use Android Market™ application that automatically connects your favorite smartphone apps to Smart Extras™ or accessories. . Developers can learn more at the Smart Extension SDK, which gives further information about how to create apps for the SmartWatch on the Android market.

Make it yours, customize your SmartWatch with any 20mm wristband. Or wear its stylish, soft-rubber wristband. You can even use it as a clip. This ultra-sleek, ultra-slim Android™ remote was designed to impress.

SmartWatch ColorWristband Sony

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Predicting what will happen in 2012, therefore, is a shot in the dark: A year is virtually a lifetime in the digital era. And yet we can at least make a guess at what will happen in the early part of next year simply by looking at the trends that are shaping the latter half of this year.

Here’s the best estimate of some of the innovation we’ll see in 2012:

1. Touch computing

New input methods will be the dominant trend of 2012. Tablet computers such as the iPad might seem like a nice alternative to desktop and laptop computers, but they’re more than that: They’re replacements. Just as the command line (remember that?) gave way to graphical user interfaces, so the mouse will be superseded by touchscreens.

The signs are obvious: Windows 8 and Mac OS X Lion, the latest desktop operating systems, borrow heavy from their mobile counterparts. These new interfaces essentially impose a touchscreen-inspired interface over the traditional desktop environment.

Over time, this half-step will become a whole one, and mobile operating systems will dominate. The transition won’t be complete by the end of 2012, but we’ll be much further down the path, and using computer mice much less often.

2. Social Networking and Social gestures

Mobile social networking is the fastest-growing consumer mobile app category. Social network platforms are sucking in increasing amounts of network traffic. As mainstream adoption progresses, global social sites will be driven toward providing services in partnership with third parties using open APIs, and are likely to evolve to a role as infrastructure providers acting as data warehouses and providing user data and access to the more-consumer-facing brands. They are becoming portals, transit hubs and cloud storage for increasing amounts of messaging and e-mail traffic, videos, photos, games and commerce.

In the social media realm, social gestures appear to be the leading trend of 2012. Instead, everything you listen to, read or watch is automatically posted to your profile once you approve the relevant app. Launched by Facebook in September, this so-called “frictionless sharing” functionality removes the need to click a button to share media with your friends.

The trend makes sense for social networks: With 800 million people already on Facebook, its growth is bound to slow. There’s a big problem, however: Users may be “creeped out” by all this automated sharing of their Web activity and grow suspicious of the apps using it. But if sharing becomes automatic, the volume of content on Facebook will grow at an accelerated pace.

3. NFC and mobile payments

Google Wallet, Google’s mobile-payment system, may become more widespread in 2012.

Next year is likely to be the year when mobile payments blossom. While we’ve seen a great deal of innovation in mobile payments technology this year — including the success of Square’s iPhone dongle, allowing anyone to accept credit card payments — 2012 is the year of NFC.

But some analysts do not believe that it will become mainstream before 2015. They need to increase user awareness, extend the service coverage and address ease-of-use to appeal to end users. In order to get consumers on board, payment solution providers also need to address ease-of-use for users and ease-of-implementation for customers without compromising security.

By 2013, 1 in 5 cellphones are expected to be NFC-equipped. Early contenders include Google Wallet, Visa Wallet, Serve (by American Express) and ISIS.

4. Beyond the iPad

If touch computing is the future, then the iPad is surely king. And yet the iPad came up against serious competition in the latter part of 2011. New Amazon Kindle Fire expected to outsell the iPad in 2012. Why? Simply put, the iPad costs $499 while the Fire costs $199.

With tablet devices, the hardware is somewhat important but the content available for the device is absolutely critical: With plenty of media available for the Fire right away, it’s an appealing proposition. Amazon’s advantages don’t stop at the price point, however: The company owns an entire content store of movies, e-books, TV shows and other media

Why does one device constitute an entire trend? Well, as a true competitor to the iPad emerges, content producers, distributors and even app developers may have an entirely new platform on which to push their wares. (And yes, the Kindle Fire does indeed run Google’s Android operating system, but Amazon’s version is so unlike other Android tablets that neither users nor app developers will perceive it as “yet another Android device” — it’s a whole new platform.)

5. TV Everywhere

So you thought you’d be able to watch all your favorite shows online and get rid of your cable subscription for good? Not so fast!

The cable companies have a cunning plan: They’ll let you watch live TV, plus on-demand movies and TV shows, on your connected devices if you keep your cable subscription. Dish Network, Time Warner and Comcast are among those offering the service.

TV Everywhere has been buzzed about since 2010, of course, and could be a dud — but the rise of tablet devices would seem to create increased demand for a “TV in your hands.”

6.  Object Recognition – Voice control

Here’s another trend that’s got a moderate chance of taking off in 2012: Voice control.

High-end devices have an increased sensor and processing capability that enable sophisticated applications to recognize the user’s surroundings, including specific objects of interest. Because OR provides an easy-to-use interface, more apps will come to the market with enhanced capabilities by 2012.

Siri, the voice-control feature in the iPhone 4S, may spread to other devices.

The novelty of Siri on the iPhone 4S — which allows you to send texts, create reminders, search the Web and much more using just your voice — may be the start of a new trend in voice controlled devices.

Surely voice control has been around for years? Yes, but it wasn’t very accurate.

What’s more, Apple may use voice control to replace the TV remote. Siri and its ilk define a new era in which we talk, and our devices understand — often on the first attempt. Other device makers will likely follow suit

7. Mobile Video

Mobile phones with larger screens and media tablets offer the ideal platform for video consumption and with careful marketing and consumer education, Gartner believes that carriers and content providers would be able to drive mobile video usage in the coming years.

8. Second-screen experiences

“Second-screen experiences” is a buzz-phase among TV and movie execs these days. It refers to apps (mainly on the iPad) that listen to the audio output of your TV and display content related to the show or movie you’re watching. The chances are that you already use your tablet computer or phone while watching TV, so there’s ample opportunity to make the viewing experience a more interactive one.

Disney already has second-screen apps for movies such as “The Lion King” and “Bambi,” while multiple TV networks have similar offerings: We can expect many, many more to be released in 2012.

9. Flexible screens

Flexible screens: These awesome new bendable interfaces will let you zoom in, zoom out and scroll around a page simply by twisting your phone or tablet. Nokia and Samsung have both hinted they may release phones with bendable displays in 2012. The really exciting stuff, however — like paper-thin devices that roll up to fit in your pocket — is still years away.

10. HTML5

It’s HTML5 — the fifth iteration of the HTML standard — and it lets developers create richer, more interactive applications than ever.Why does this matter? As developers tire of building applications for every operating system out there — from Android to iOS to Windows Phone and beyond — HTML5 offers the opportunity to build an app once and have it work everywhere.

The rise of HTML5 is bound to be accelerated by a recent revelation: Adobe is killing off Flash for mobile devices, meaning one of the primary methods of serving videos and rich applications on mobile phones is about to disappear. HTML5 will fill that gap. For us as consumers, that means richer applications and experiences on all our devices.

In short, 2012 is all about new ways to interact with our devices through touch and voice control, new lightweight ways to share content, a revolution in mobile payments and a plethora of rich Web applications — not to mention the hundreds of new innovations that we’ve yet to dream up.

Multi-Touch Table Display Screen and Multi-Touch Surface Computer Technology Video :

Related Video :

CES roundup video: The hottest tech in 90 seconds
How much hot CES tech can one exhausted journalist squish into a mere 90 seconds of video? Luke Westaway attempts to answer that question in this round-up of all the best things he´s seen this year at the Las Vegas show in an inordinately short snippet of film. Hit play and feast your greedy eyes upon phones, tellies and gadgets galore.

It happens every time: as soon as we wax a load of cash on the latest gadget, the price of said tech will suddenly drop. A year later, regular as clockwork, the value of our gadget will have nose-dived to the extent that we’d be lucky to get 20p and a packet of wine gums for it on eBay.

Ho-hum — that’s the price we pay for being early adopters. But have you ever wondered why, in these austere times, everything else seems to be getting more and more expensive while technology is becoming more and more affordable?

The reason is, in a word, innovation. For over half a century, computers and chips have been getting simultaneously more powerful and less expensive. Moore’s Law — which states that the number of transistors on a given chip can be doubled every two years — has been the guiding principle of progress in computing since Intel co-founder Gordon Moore first coined the phrase in 1965. And, for the same amount of time, people have predicted it would hit a wall.

So far it hasn’t, meaning computers have been getting exponentially more powerful as ever greater numbers of transistors are packed into an ever-smaller space. Modern chips pack in billions of transistors spaced a few tens of nanometres apart.

“One question is, how can Moore’s Law continue?” asks Professor Milo Shaffer of the London Centre for Nanotechnology. “There’s a sense that we’ve been getting away with continually reducing the size and that’s got to run out. You’re going to start bumping into atomic structures. And before you bump into individual atoms you bump into other phenomena which will stop your device working in the way it should. So you start needing an alternative mode of operation.”

Could the solution be a processor which runs on light rather than electricity? Photons travel faster than electrons, and in theory light-based processors could be a million times faster than our creaky old single-digit gigahertz CPUs.

This is just one idea being explored at the London Centre for Nanotechnology. Scientists here spend their days looking for ways to make ever-faster processors to satisfy our need for ever more advanced ultrabooks and smart phones. They invited us to their impressive lab to see what the future of computing will look like. Join us by clicking play on the video.

Are you looking forward to terahertz computing? Let us know in the comments below, or on our Facebook page.

Related Videos :

Light-based CPUs could break the Terahertz barrier
The beauty of technology is that when you come to buy a new phone, laptop or camera, you can always bag a significantly better model for the same price you paid for the outdated hunk of junk you wish to dispose of. In this video, Jerome Evans visits the London Centre for Nanotechnology and discovers how nanotechnology makes this possible and what it might mean for the future of computing. Hit play for the full story.

Is OLED tech the future of TV? It’s looking more and more likely, as now both LG and Samsung have announced 55-inch versions of these slender-screened beauties.

Samsung’s own effort has been revealed at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, and is modestly dubbed the Samsung Super OLED TV. Read on for all the specs, and whether we reckon Samsung has managed to trounce LG’s recently-unveiled OLED tellybox.

We’d hazard that it’ll be quite pricey, so now might be a good time to start saving. There’s no word on pricing or availability yet, but we know the Super OLED TV will be out this year.

Super OLED screen

Samsung OLED TV

OLED screens are usually seen hanging around in mobile phones, but they allow for slim displays that offer great contrast and wide viewing angles. We likely won’t know what kind of visible impact that display difference has until we can test these tellies properly under controlled conditions. While Samsung’s panel features tiny red, green and blue pixels, LG’s OLED telly adds a fourth white pixel.

Design

This TV is extremely slim, and has a very narrow bezel, which gives the impression that the image is floating in mid-air. We’ve only been given a brief glimpse of the 55-inch Super OLED TV, but even that was enough to demonstrate how thin and understated the design on offer here is.

It’s very futuristic, and will doubtless elicit impressed ‘oooh’ noises from your dinner guests when you usher them into the living room. However, our American cousins have been informed that the actual depth of the Super OLED TV is 0.3 inches, which equates to a little under 8mm — twice that of LG’s telly, which is 4mm thick.

Obviously that’s only a few millimetres difference, but if both OLED TVs end up being a similar price, with similar image quality, being fractionally thicker could put Samsung at a disadvantage.

Samsung says the Super OLED TV is produced from a single pane of glass — we’re looking forward to seeing it up close to inspect exactly how well put-together it proves to be.

3D

Whether or not you prefer active 3D or its passive alternative (as seen in LG’s OLED TV) will come down to personal taste — we recommend trying them both out in a shop. The Super OLED TV is 3D-enabled, and like Samsung’s other 3D tellies, it will employ active-3D tech. That means the glasses you’ll be using are powered, and as such are a lot more expensive to buy.

HD camera

The Super OLED TV sports a built-in camera that comes in handy across a range of functions, letting you use your TV without having to pick up the boring old remote.

Voice recognition is in place as well thanks to a built-in microphone, which could save you time when it comes to text entry — saying what you want to search for is quicker than painstakingly entering characters using a remote. Face recognition means you can have more than one profile on the TV, while gesture recognition lets you move through menus by waving your arms around.

You could also use that camera for video chat, bringing us one step closer to the massive Skype-style TV seen in Back to the Future Part 2. We’re a tad sceptical about how well these features will work — they’re all in place already in Microsoft’s Kinect accessory for the Xbox 360, and we’ve found things like gesture and voice control to be unreliable at times. Still, we’ll stay open-minded until the full review.

Today we learned that Angry Birds will be heading to the platform, so if you’re a fan of the furious feathered ones, you’re in luck. You also get access to the range of apps available for Samsung Smart TVs.

Outlook

The Samsung Super OLED TV looks like a great bit of kit, and we’re excited to see how the OLED display holds up when we give it the full review treatment. Stay tuned