1. Go to an Apple store and use it. Its nothing like a CDROM encyclopedia. Encarta comes to mind. The richness of Apple's Textbook experience is definitely immersive and, like most of their products, can't be perceived until you actually use it for a while.
3. Interactive features can be a movie, HTML(5), 3D, or, yes, a Keynote presentation. Imagine a richer image gallery type experience, but with text, transitions, effects, etc. All this can be done w/ Keynote (and a little bit of visual design know-how) right now.
4. Not basic Keynote-style interactive stuff like I described above. You need to be able to produce and edit movies to add a movie. You need to be able to use 3-D software to make a 3-D model. This is obvious stuff. Multiple disciplines go into making even paper textbooks.
6. eInk IS great... for long-format reading. K-12 and Undergrad textbooks never really involve that much long-format reading. Plus Apple is trying to really show that there are alternative ways to learn besides reading. Getting immersed in the subject matter — whether that's through video, audio, games, text, or anything — is the real threshold to learning.
7. iBook is based on the ePub3 standard. I think they're one in the same, but with different headers.
8. See above.
9. No. Never will be.
10. No. Probably will never be able to.
11. No. Textbooks won't exist in 50 years as all knowledge will grow into your brain from a bionano parasite injected into all humans upon birth.
OK, now to take 9,10, and 11 more seriously:
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, textbooks are hugely expensive and are NOT designed to last forever. They contain proprietary information owned by a publisher who has the right to let you not share it. I'm sure some version of these books will be stored in the Library of Congress forever. And much of the material is probably available online or at the library in one way or another. Isn't that fine?
Apple is ushering in a new wave of education materials reform that costs LESS than the current model and is practically weightless. Who cares that you can't pass it on or share it. Its practically disposable.
Actually, it is probably yes on 11 (50-year down the track). Unless Apple encrypted the format, it is epub3 - zip file with html, xml, and other standard-based formats in there. Unzip, extract, modify, recreate under emulator. Same story as OpenOffice.org. Much better than than MSWord formats and - frankly - much better than books from 50 years ago, which if you wanted to do any "modern" thing with (e.g. searching), you would have to rip apart, scan, do text-recognition, layout-reconstruction, etc.
Now, if Apple has put a real DRM/Encryption in there, it would be quite another story. Even then, 50 years down the track, any digital modern encryption will probably be a 10-second crack away.
> Now, if Apple has put a real DRM/Encryption in there, it would be quite another story.
I'm pretty sure iBookStore ebooks are DRM'd (same as Kindle files) (EPUB has a provision specifically for DRM, FWIW) but according to an other commenter the .ibook output of iBook Author is an epub3 book, you can just change the file extension and drop it into an ebook reader (though Apple has apparently added e.g. CSS extensions for nifty effects, which your ebook reader likely won't support).
1. Go to an Apple store and use it. Its nothing like a CDROM encyclopedia. Encarta comes to mind. The richness of Apple's Textbook experience is definitely immersive and, like most of their products, can't be perceived until you actually use it for a while.
3. Interactive features can be a movie, HTML(5), 3D, or, yes, a Keynote presentation. Imagine a richer image gallery type experience, but with text, transitions, effects, etc. All this can be done w/ Keynote (and a little bit of visual design know-how) right now.
4. Not basic Keynote-style interactive stuff like I described above. You need to be able to produce and edit movies to add a movie. You need to be able to use 3-D software to make a 3-D model. This is obvious stuff. Multiple disciplines go into making even paper textbooks.
6. eInk IS great... for long-format reading. K-12 and Undergrad textbooks never really involve that much long-format reading. Plus Apple is trying to really show that there are alternative ways to learn besides reading. Getting immersed in the subject matter — whether that's through video, audio, games, text, or anything — is the real threshold to learning.
7. iBook is based on the ePub3 standard. I think they're one in the same, but with different headers.
8. See above.
9. No. Never will be.
10. No. Probably will never be able to.
11. No. Textbooks won't exist in 50 years as all knowledge will grow into your brain from a bionano parasite injected into all humans upon birth.
OK, now to take 9,10, and 11 more seriously:
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, textbooks are hugely expensive and are NOT designed to last forever. They contain proprietary information owned by a publisher who has the right to let you not share it. I'm sure some version of these books will be stored in the Library of Congress forever. And much of the material is probably available online or at the library in one way or another. Isn't that fine?
Apple is ushering in a new wave of education materials reform that costs LESS than the current model and is practically weightless. Who cares that you can't pass it on or share it. Its practically disposable.