Is Apple about to take Amazon to school?
In theory Apple is making an announcement today and Mike Elgin at CultOfMac thinks he knows what’s up:
I think we can expect to see the beginnings of a system that connects textbook authors to students. Between those two Apple-using connection points lies writing, editing and other types of creative collaboration, design, layout, and more. The textbooks of the future will be cheaper and more frequently updated. They’ll be annotatable by teachers or customizable by school districts and universities.
Although Apple may initially partner with textbook companies, ultimately textbook publishers will be pushed aside because they’re too slow and inefficient.
In other words, I think Apple will begin the long process Thursday of reinventing the textbook industry as a stepping stone to eventually reinventing the entire publishing industry.
In addition to re-inventing the textbook industry, I think Apple will re-invent the textbook. The obvious way to do this is to integrate multimedia. Because textbooks will be conveyed as iOS apps, they’ll have video, and audio, worksheets, interactive quizzes, “flash card” functionality and much more.
Starting with textbooks makes enormous sense for Apple. The company has always emphasized the education market. Schools at all levels have taken to iPads in a massive way. Re-inventing textbooks to be read on iPads will be something welcome by students, teachers, school districts and universities.
As part of Apple’s effort both to serve the education market and also to clobber Amazon.com, I think Apple will announce sometime this year, possibly Thursday, a 7-inch iPad (widely rumored) and sell it at very low cost to undermine the attractiveness of the Amazon Kindle Fire.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if Apple offered new special discounts for bulk purchases of iPads to schools.
I believe that whatever Apple announces will be a step — larger or small — toward controlling the textbook market by enabling the disintermediation of the industry — the removal of publishers, printers and others from the supply chain.
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By the time Apple has transformed the high end of the textbook market, they’ll be ready to go after books in general, which will by then also be ready to go it alone without publishing intermediaries and will also be ripe for multimedia.
The familiarity with Apple’s publishing systems in academia by students, teachers and professors will ease their entry into the bigger publishing world. Writers tend to go to school. And this is yet another great reason to start the conquest of publishing with textbooks.
An alternative scenario is that in addition to a program to corner and reinvent the textbook market, Apple may also offer publishing tools for authors to sell iBooks to the general reading public as well.
But no matter what specific programs and products Apple announces Thursday, you can be certain that Amazon.com won’t like it.
My family has gone all in with Apple: MacBookPro, iPad, iPhone. I resisted out of habit of a long-time familiarity with PCs, but I laid that semi-commitment to rest last year just about this time by switching over to an MBP.
With whatever Apple does in terms eBooks and publishing, that will be fun to watch them vs. Amazon. Then there’s Apple iTV which could create a tsunami of reactions in Hollywood. Taking a macro view of things, I wonder if the only thing standing in Apple’s way on any front is the void left by Steve Jobs’ death.
What’s your take on Apple? Are you an advocate? Convert? Where do you see them going in the next 5–10 years in terms of publishing and delivery entertainment via their iTV?
For more of the article, go here.
UPDATE: And as predicted, here is the news from Apple today:
Apple unveiled iBooks 2, the next iteration of its iBooks software. It also launched iBooks Author, a new e-book and enhanced e-book creation tool. Both are available in the Apple App Store for free today, the company said at an announcement this morning at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
The new software will revolutionize both the textbook industry and e-book creation. There is a new section in the iBooks store for textbooks and the Author app is geared toward textbook creation with built-in templates for math and science books, but it can be used for the creation of any book.
Why do I feel like we are standing on the shore of yet another amazing technological journey?
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