The eBook textbook world just took another leap last week. The major players are Kindle, iBook, and Nook. Apple has enhanced their multimedia authoring platform (iBooks Author) to allow their books to be viewed on iPhones for the first time, yet more importantly, the iBooks can now be read (interacted with) on non-Apple devices such as Samsung Galaxy and Microsoft Surface tablets.
James Rice has written a fine article “Did Apple Just Change Textbooks Forever?” interpreting this radical shift in the Apple ecosystem. Apple’s latest enhancements portend a huge shift in how we will disseminate classroom information in the not-too-distant future, and it makes for a much richer teaching-learning environment.