Roger Rosner, VP for Productivity Software, has just come up on stage to show off some textbooks using iBooks 2. And it looks pretty amazing.
iBooks 2 is trying to solve the app problem by making regular iBooks as interactive as a dedicated app. Rosner describes them as “cool, rich, engaging interactive experiences,” and he’s right. These are texbooks straight out of the future.
One of the first things he shows off is how, in a biology textbook, a student can zoom into a picture to see 3D models right inside a cell. Images can animate, be interactive, etc.
But what if you just want to read text without all those videos zooming around? No problem. Landscape orientation is interactive, portrait orientation is just text. Brilliant solution.
In iBooks 2, table of contents is accessed with just a pinch. Glossary terms and dictionary elements can be accessed just by tapping. Notes are left with just a tap. Want to highlight a passage? Just swipe across it: your finger is the highlighter.
The best part for students, though, is that there are visual, interactive Q&A sections at the end of each textbook chapter for review. Man, I wish we’d had some of this stuff when I was in college: this would have made studying painless and fun.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
