All about Apple's New Move in Digital Textbooks

Apple is launching a new online store, which is your tool to shop and place orders with Apple," the note reads. "Proposal creation, order status, and a dramatically simplified user interface will make it easier to do business with Apple — all in a secure and reliable environment.

Today, at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York Inkling annoubced "Habitat". which gives professional publishers everything they need to create and publish media-rich interactive content for both iPad and the Web, cross platform and at scale.

iBooks Author experts Joe Wood and Burt Lo share why this new software is important and how to introduce it to schools right now. As your district explores mobile device deployments, iBooks Author will be an important tool for incorporating district- or teacher-created digital texts.

-seven reasons why you should consider adding iBooks Author to your knowledge base

-the areas technology leaders may want to consider

Do you know The 10 Most Common Teacher Complaints Against iBooks(as in this post from http://www.onlineuniversities.com)? Do you agree with the arguments in this article? Let other educators know your experiences and viewpoints by leaving your comments.

To evaluate Apple’s textbook strategy, compare it to the goals of the “One Laptop Per Child” initiative. The biggest problem with the Apple initiative–missed by most commentators—is that the iPad is an entertainment device, and has many interesting ways to interact with content but not to create it. In contrast, OLPC’s XO system was planned from the start to let children create and share text, video, and other content. It is an empowerment device. (Google claims that its Chromebooks are similarly empowering.)

iBooks Author is the first tool of its kind. Never before have publishers, authors, and content creators had a tool for making dynamic, interactive ebooks in a WYSIWYG environment. This book is intended to get you up and writing in iBooks Author.

If you missed Apple’s big announcement about it’s new textbook publishing platform recently, you’re not alone. Without the hoopla of a major device launch the textbook publishing announcement didn’t get the attention of the average consumer. But buried within the announcement was a nugget that could be a very valuable tool for membership site owners.

Inkling Co-founder and CEO Matthew MacInnis tells us that, two years ago, the team set out to build a publishing platform that would redefine digital media, starting with the reinvention of the textbook. 

The startup’s new platform targets the other end of the spectrum from iBooks: Professional publishers, giving them an industrial, or enterprise, platform that includes everything they need to create and publish interactive content for both the iPad and HTML5-based web content. No desktop software, and no constraints of the printed page.

Habitat allows everything to be instantly published (and updated!) in a few clicks.

Habitat is the “first integrated publishing environment” built for professional publishers. It allows publishers to push updates to every target platform once, while automatically customizing layouts for each device.

Habitat also boasts an object-oriented content structure, in other words, the platform is semantic, and “content is treated like software, shifting the industry from a page-based model to a software-based model.”

Among the platform’s other features, Habitat includes automated error reporting, as it scans the content every time it’s published to make sure it all works, automatically finding broken links, missing files, etc. Habitat also automatically saves every version of the entire project, every time, from start to finish, which means that editors can rollback changes at any point during the process — all the way back to the beginning. This is huge.

One could see InDesign and other Adobe products potentially being threatened were Habitat to achieve widescale adoption. When I asked Matt whether Inkling’s new system could take, say, PDFs or some other Adobe output and turn them into a digital textbook, his answer was yes — and no.

What’s more, Inkling says that its 3-D rendering engine can handle an order of magnitude of polygons more than Apple’s current offering, which enriches all of its content engines. No doubt this will be of interest to Apple. And, in terms of Inkling’s new web interface, all of this rich media is dynamically loaded on your browser, taking some of the burden off and adding speed to the rendering of its interactive content.

Of course, together iBooks and Habitat together could be a great initial one, two punch for both amateur and professional publishers.