Having reinvented a variety of other markets, Apple is now turning its attention to textbooks. On Thursday, the technology giant announced iBooks 2, through which it hopes to reinvent textbooks on the iPad.

At the press event held in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller talked about education being deep in Apple's DNA since the very beginning -- referring to the fact that Apple built much of its early empire by getting schools to use Macintosh computers throughout the late '80s and '90s.

With digital textbooks on the iPad, Schiller said, users can avoid the weight, wear and tear, and non-searchability that hinder learning with textbooks.

'Beautiful Books'

iBooks 2 is now available as a free download, and Schiller said high school textbooks will be available through the company's iBookstore at $14.99 each or less. The authoring tool, iBooks Author, is available for free, and includes Apple-provided templates.

iBooks 2 makes extensive use of interactive multimedia, with support for gestural navigation, interactive 3D objects, videos, audio, interactive quizzes, note-taking, and other modes. "These are beautiful books," Schiller told the news media. He added that "kids are really going to love to learn with textbooks in iBook." The company said it has been developing digital textbooks with McGraw-Hill, Pearson PLC, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which together account for the vast majority of textbooks in the U.S.

Not including the impact from iBooks 2, 6 percent of textbooks are expected to be available in digital form in 2012, twice the percentage available last year. One distributor, MBS Direct Digital, has estimated that half of all textbooks will be digital by the end of this decade. There are about 1.5 million iPads in educational institutions, and the device has about 70 percent of the tablet market.

The event was Apple's first since CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs died last year. Anticipation of this announcement has been fed by the importance of digital textbooks to Jobs, as described in Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography. Jobs told Isaacson that textbooks represented "an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction."

'One of Most Important' Apple Announcements

Michael Gartenberg, research director for Gartner, said today's announcement "may be one of the most important" the company has ever made. He added that the "impact potentially could be far larger" than the changes the company has made in the music, phone, and other markets, but that it "will take much longer for changes in the educational system to happen."

Apple also announced a new version of its iTunes U app, which previously had been used primarily for lectures. The new version allows users to teach, take or manage entire courses. In addition to lectures, the app now also provides such components as assignments, books, quizzes or syllabi, and is also available free from the App Store.

iBooks can be accessed within the app, and there is free educational content for the iTunes U app from such educational institutions as Harvard, Duke, Oxford and Stanford. The new app also will be extended to K-12 educators.

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