On Thursday, Apple announced, at a special education event in New York City that they have updated the iBooks application to iBooks 2 for iPad to accommodate interactive textbooks, something that has remained unchanged for generations. Apple is looking to redefine the usgae and distribution of textbooks and information, and is using its already available iBookStore and bracnhing out.

Introducing iBooks 2 — now with iBooks textbooks.

– Experience gorgeous Multi-Touch textbooks designed for iPad
– iBooks textbooks are filled with interactive features, diagrams, photos, and videos
– Tap to dive into images with interactive captions, rotate 3D objects, swipe through image galleries, watch videos in full screen, and more
– Use a finger as a highlighter when swiping over text in a textbook
– Take advantage of Study Cards to help you memorize important highlights, notes, and glossary terms
– Tap glossary terms to see definitions of key topics and concepts without leaving the page

With the addition of textbooks in iBooks 2, Apple is trying to make textbooks into what the App Store is today, by increasing reliance on Apple’s services to get books and materials for students. This is very similiar to how Apple created the iTunes Store, revolutionizing music, and the App Store.

Apple is currently partnering with McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which are responsible for 90% of textbook sales in the United States. McGraw-Hill and Pearson are releasing several titles for the iPad today and will be releasing more as time progresses.

Prices of textbooks range from $14.99 or less and allow authors of the textbooks to add information as they like through their ‘iBooks Author’ app which allows users to create their own textbooks. iBooks, which caused a small stir during its introduction and is slowly picking up as a major part of Apple’s education movement.

iBooks 2 is currently available in the App Store as an update to the current application.

The Magic of Reality Review: Most books are made available for electronic formats generally in two forms, PDF or ePub. Both of these formats allow the full document of the book to be published along with illustrations and for the most part do a great job. However, some books are beginning to take full advantage of tablet’s full color touch screen by providing a more interactive experience and in the case of The Magic of Reality that is certainly true.

At $13.99 it may make many people balk at the price, however, when you consider that you are getting the full text of the book and interactive features the price becomes much more validated.

The Magic of Reality for iPad attempts to present the world in a real, scientific perspective, debunking myths and putting forward the beauty and fascination that the real, natural world provides.

For anyone that knows the work of Richard Dawkin’s it will come as no surprise that he uses this platform to discuss not only the myths of childhood tales but also of religious mythology and it’s all presented in a way that is great for older children and for adults alike.

The app starts with a video introduction from the author, where he details the book and his aims for it, once you have past this you are launched into the content it self.

While you can read the book in the normal way, flipping between pages, you can also swipe down on the iPad with two fingers to reveal two streams of the content. Using the top stream allows you to jump between the 12 chapters, while the 2nd stream allows you to browse the pages of the selected chapter.

The illustrations by Dave McKean look even more beautiful on the iPad than they do in the book itself and as you scroll between the pages the illustrations scroll in the background too. In some case the illustrations are animated that really bring the book to life.

But that’s not the only difference between the physical book and this iPad version. Throughout the book there are audio pieces read by Dawkins and then there are the interactive pages where you can attempt to evolve frogs, alter liquid and fire newtons cannon. While these interactive features aren’t full blown mini-games they help break up the text and are especially useful in explaining some of the concepts of the book to younger children.

The Magic of Reality is a great example of how to produce an interactive reading experience on an iPad. While the content itself is engaging, thought provoking and informative the production values set this above and beyond your standard eBook.

What we like:

• Full content of the book
• Beautiful illustrations
• Interactive content

What to know:

• This is how interactive books should be made!

This is no doubt to bring all published media going through the App Store in line with each other, and to ensure Apple get their 30% cut of these transactions.

Apple rejected Sony’s eBook app earlier this week, using this clarification as the reason, and it remains to be seen what action they will take against other large digital publishers who have apps on iTunes, and have yet to fall foul of this clarification.

The Wall Street Journal already has an app which uses its own payment system to process iPad transactions, as do Pearson PLC’s Financial Times and Zinio – who sell a great number of magazines through their digital-newstand app.

AAPL has not confirmed that those apps, or whether Amazon’s Kindle app or Barnes & Nobles’s Nook app will be affected. Those last two don’t allow any purchases in their apps, but they do allow users to download content they have bought outside of Apple’s eco-system.

Do you think Apple’s “clarification” is understandable? Or is it a little greedy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments…

It was looking for a while as if the European, and UK pickings in Apple’s iBookstore might have been a bit lean. Apple was said to be having some problems getting parters to come into the iBookstore fold. Part of the reason for this was apparently to do with differing regulations for book agencies in the UK particularly.

As of this morning in the UK, Hachette UK, Penguin, HarperCollins and Pan Macmillan have all opened their doors, metaphorically, in Apple’s new virtual book emporium, iBookstore, on the iPad.

The good news is that there seems to be a lot of content to choose from, and Apple are offering sample portions of books. The bad news is that prices are not as competitive as some had hoped.

Unfortunately prices seem to be a little higher than through other online eBook services, some people are reporting. Hopefully Apple can iron that out moving forwards.

Have you picked up an iPad in the UK today? Are you planning on using iBookstore for your reading material shopping?
Let us know in the comments.

In a perfect world, well Apple’s version of a perfect world, there would be no iPads outside of the US at the moment. But there are! In a few of the countries that the iPad will officially be launched the iBookstore app is starting to show up some locally available content. So we can see Apple starting to breath life into its services a little ahead of their official launch.

The content is limited at the moment. And most offerings seem to be coming from the free Project Gutenberg titles. Hopefully we’ll see more in coming weeks. As well as the iBookstore app on iPhones and iPods when iPhone OS 4.0 drops.

One of the reasons for this limited amount of content is because of different regulations for book copyright in some territories, as well as ongoing negotiations by Apple to sign publishers up. In the UK, for example, competition law regulates that publishers must be in control of book pricing. This presents problems for Apple’s iBookstore agency style model.

“The legality of the model in the UK is yet to be established,” reports The Bookseller. “Industry sources have warned for several weeks that the agency model used to sell e-books through the iBookStore could face legal hurdles.”

But it does seem that Apple are committed to making this work in other places than the US alone. And that will be a good thing for books, just as it was a good thing for music with iTunes.

Are you looking forward to digital book distribution on the iPad in Europe and elsewhere? Let us know your thoughts in the comments…

Apple have confirmed our estimate today with an official Press Release trumpeting the fact that they sold their “one Millionth iPad on Friday, just 28 days after its introduction on April 3″.

Apple also followed those figures up with some impressive iPad app, and ebook statistics. 12 million iPad apps have been downloaded from a catalog of 5000 already created for the device, and 1.5 million ebooks have been downloaded as well.

Even more poignantly Steve Jobs has this to say :

One million iPads in 28 days that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone. Demand continues to exceed supply and we’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers.

When you look at Steve Jobs’ statement it is quite an impressive statistic. Many people thought the iPad would sell. But many people also thought it would be a niche product. Initially outselling what is arguably Apple’s most popular product in recent history, the iPhone, doesn’t make the iPad seem that niche anymore!

Are you impressed at the sales Apple have managed to date? Or frustrated to still be waiting for your iPad, if you live outside the US? Let us know your views in the comments.

Today Barnes & Noble updated their blog with some information about their upcoming iPad app.

The app will be designed specifically for the iPad and will feature more than one million eBooks, magazines and newspapers in the Barnes & Noble eBookstore.

B&N eReader for iPad is expected to be made available in the first week of April.

Source: B&N Unbound

Microsoft’s Courier tablet was first mentioned on tech sites a couple of months ago. At the time it was only a concept which existed in the form of a kind of User Interface showcase with cartoon hands controlling a virtual device. But those concept videos were rather impressive and very forward thinking. Of the many UI features that impressed me one really stuck in my mind. It was perhaps the simplest of them all, but it struck me as really nifty. When you want to transfer a picture or note to the clipboard you just slide it to the hinge of the device and it sticks there partly exposed on both screens. You can then flip through pages until you find the one you want. Once there you slide the clipping out onto either screen and paste it. Simple, but so cool I wanted one just so I could try it!

The User Interface of the Courier overall had the same shock and awe effect on me that the iPhone’s did when I first saw it. Before that OS X blew me away similarly.

Because at that stage the Courier was a concept no-one had any idea of the dimensions of the device. Or how much of the hardware was actually real. Or even how close to reality the incredibly impressive conceptual GUI of this thing was. All we did know was that the Courier had two screens, and opened like a traditional book with a hinge in the middle. It also supposedly had a pen, although the UI videos showed both multitouch with fingers and the pen being used. Oh, and it had a camera if the concept videos were accurate. We get to see it taking shots with that, and those snaps being filed away in a scrap book, edited and collated, and used as part of a presentation.

My initial reaction to the hinged device idea was that I wondered how people were going to actually use a device on the move which folded in the middle. How would it stay open on your lap? How would you type, draw or work with it when also having to hold it. Would the hinge be floppy or stiff? It was all the same kind of concerns that people had about how Apple’s take on a Tablet would work for typing and viewing movies etc. But I loved some of the ideas that were being explored with the Courier. Part of the reason that I worried about the folding design was that I envisioned it being around the size of a legal note pad when folded shut. So around the size of a magazine. I am not sure why, but that was my impression. My mind was stuck with the idea of a traditional tablet sized device or something about the size of the iPad, I guess.

Looking at the concept videos again it is fairly clear that this thing is not actually that big. Indeed, pictures that Engadget have today show the device (or at least a mockup) in human hands, and as being much closer to the size of a traditional paperback. For some reason this has made a massive impression on me. Engadet’s information on the device is here.

The videos (which have been around for a while now) are further down the same page. Make sure you watch them. They are obviously not real. By that I mean they are not running on a real device. But there is no reason in this day and age that a User Interface could not do all the things we are seeing there. And if Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 7 interface is anything to go by then the general look and feel all fits. Again though, all we’ve seen of that is flashy web sites and conceptsÉ so far.

Engadget have this to say: “Courier will function as a “digital journal,” and it’s designed to be seriously portable: it’s under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn’t much bigger than a 5×7 photo when closed. That’s a lot smaller than we expected.” With reference to that last sentence: Join the club guys!

If, and this is a big if. But if Microsoft can produce this device so that it looks as good as the pictures we have seen to date. And if the User Interface has the functionality detailed in those concept videos, then the Courier is going to be truly remarkable. And I will camp outside a store or travel half way round the world to buy one on day one. And I’ll want to develop for it too.

I am not convinced that this device will be all that the videos and pictures promise. It just seems too good to be true. But if it is then I think we could see a massive shift in power in the mobile market place.

Microsoft could really be making a rather incredible device that people simply must have.

What do you think about the Courier? Is it the iPad slayer or is it promising too much and will it underwhelm in real life?

By: Stephen Northcott

Microsoft’s Courier: Videos of the interface in action

Images and Video Credit: Engadget