Apple unveils iPad textbook store

Financial Times – Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson

19-Jan

Apple has announced its long-awaited move into the digital textbook market, unveiling a new bookstore for its iPad tablets, a free publishing tool to help authors create interactive instructional materials and a new application for its “iTunes U” service for sharing university courses. Apple’s latest effort to persuade content companies that it is an ally featured large publishers, including Pearson, which owns the Financial Times, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, as well as smaller groups such as the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, run by a Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist. Publishers would benefit from not bearing traditional printing costs and from the potential to reach new consumer markets around the world, said Genevieve Shore, Pearson’s chief information officer. Ms Shore noted that Pearson was also working with other device manufacturers, such as Amazon. “It is the combination of the content and the iPad that makes it incredibly engaging, but this is just one route to the student,” she said.

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