Apple event sees the launch of iBooks 2.0, iTunes U and iBooks Author.

Prior to the Apple event yesterday, there were talks surrounding what the brand had in store. One thing was for sure was that it would be education-related. At the event held in New York, Apple took their iBooks to a new level and launched the iBooks 2 for iPad, which feature iBooks textbooks that are interactive. The iBooks textbooks offer iPad users fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, unrivaled navigation and a lot more. Apple has partnered with leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson who will deliver titles to the iBookstore with the most expensive textbook being priced at $14.99. One can download the iBooks 2.0app directly from the App Store on their iPad for free.

iBooks Author was also announced and it is already available as a free download from the Mac App Store. It lets anyone with a Mac create iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books and more, and publish them to Apple’s iBookstore. Apple says that authors and publishers of any size can start creating iBooks with Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. They go on to state that iBooks Author lets you add your own text and images by simply dragging and dropping, and with the Multi-Touch widgets you can easily add interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote presentations and 3D objects.

The last announcement from Apple at the event was iTunes U where students using iPads got access to the world’s largest catalog of free educational content, along with over 20,000 education apps at their fingertips and hundreds of thousands of books in the iBookstore, which can be used in their school curriculum, such as novels for English or Social Studies. Like the other two apps, this too is a free app that is available for download from the App Store.

For more information on these new releases,click here. Let us know your reactions regarding these new announcements from Apple. Do you think that this is what the education system is going to look like in the future?