Apple going for textbook niche

LITTLE ROCK — Apple Inc. last week introduced three pieces of free software designed to speed the demise of heavy and expensive school textbooks.

It released iBooks 2, a new version of its electronic bookstore, where students can now download textbooks; iBooks Author, a Macintosh program for creating textbooks and other books; and iTunes U, an application for instructors to create digital curricula and share course materials with students.

Digital textbooks made for iBooks can display interactive diagrams, audio and video. The iBooks Author app includes templates made by Apple, which publishers and authors can customize to suittheir content.

Apple said electronic high school textbooks from its initial publishing partners, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, would cost $15 or less. That is much cheaper than print textbooks, some of which cost more than $100.

“Education is deep in our DNA, and it has been from the very beginning,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, at the event at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Textbooks are a fat target for the technology industry. Sales of electronic textbooks accounted for only 2.8 percent of the $8 billion domestic textbook market in 2010, according to Forrester Research. For publishers, the new partnerships with Apple were more likely motivated by a desire to experiment with technology than to earn huge profits, said Sarah Rotman-Epps, a Forrester analyst.

Though the possibilities of Apple’s new publishing software in combination with the iPad tablet seemed to excite publishers, even those working on iPad textbooks said it would take time for the technology to change how most textbooks are purchased. First, there is the obvious challenge of finding the money for cash strapped schools to buy iPads, which start at $500 each in stores.

“It’s a very high and expensive hurdle to overcome,” said Josef Blumenfeld, a senior vice president at one publisher working with Apple, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Blumenfeld said Houghton had seen high engagement levels when students used an educational app for the iPad that it had already published and that it expected electronic textbooks to have the same effect.

He said, though, that schools would first have to become comfortable with the idea of paying for rights to iPad textbooks for new students every school year, rather than paying a one-time fee of, say, $60 for a printed textbook that lasts five or six years. Publishers would have to get used to the idea of Apple taking a 30 percent commission on sales. But Blumenfeld predicted that iPad textbooks would not hurt Harcourt’s profits because they would not have printing, shipping and other costs.

By most estimates, Apple has not captured as much of the electronic-book market with the iPad and its iBook store as its chief rival in the business, Amazon.com Inc., has with the Kindle e-reader. But Amazon has been less successful in the education market.

Amazon in 2009 announced plans to target the textbook publishing industry with the Kindle DX, a larger version of its e-reader. But, Amazon failed to make a dent in the market and did not impress students.

At Princeton University,which offered a Kindle DX test program, students complained about the device’s sluggishness and limited interactivity, according to the university’s student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian.

Meanwhile Apple has a deep and long-standing connection with the education market.

Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies at Abilene Christian University, led a pilot program where students and teachers used iPhones in the classroom. He called Apple’s new education tools “revolutionary” because they give users the ability to create and share books easily.

“This is something we’ve been dreaming about for years,” he said.

But Jill Ambrose, chief marketing officer at CourseSmart, said it was a potential problem that Apple’s textbooks would be exclusively available for Apple products. CourseSmart offers digital textbooks for the iPad and iPhone, and for devices that use Google Inc.’s popular Android operating system.

“Based on the fact that you have to mandate a specific device, that’s going to be difficult for school districts to decide students are going to take their strained budgets to purchase these devices,” she said.