In a report coming from Ars Technica, Apple's education centered media event on Thursday will not focus solely on announcing iBook partnerships with major textbook publishers. The company will be announcing specific tools for "improving the use of technology in education."
"Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the "GarageBand for e-books," so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users."
The extensive report goes on to detail how Steve Jobs was working on a "pet project" aimed at addressing learning and digital textbooks for quite some time before his untimely death.
"Jobs believed that textbook publishing was an "$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction," Ars said. "According to our sources close to his efforts, however, Jobs' personal involvement was perhaps more significant that even his biography purports."
Is Apple planning to launch a sort of GarageBand platform created for publishing e-books direct to iPad and iPhone?
"That's what we believe you're about to see," MacInnis told Ars (and our other sources agree). "Publishing something to ePub is very similar to publishing web content. Remember iWeb? That iWeb code didn't just get flushed down the toilet—I think you'll see some of [that code] re-purposed."
Read the entire detailed report by Chris Foresman at Ars Technica.
[photo by Canterwick]
