Apple Sells Five Million eBooks

7th June was the first day of Apple's World Wide Developer Conference, WWDC. The conference was kicked by the Steve Jobs Keynote. In the opening of the presentation Steve took the opportunity to report news and achievements. This stage of the proceedings allows Apple to bang their drum at report the progress of their latest and greatest product lines. This year Steve spoke about the progress of iBooks since the launch 65 days previously.

Since the launch with the iPad on the 3rd April, Apple has sold 5 Million ebooks in 65 days through the iBookstore payment gateway across 2 Million iPads World Wide. This equates to two and a half ebooks per iPad.

Since the iPad release in April, Apple has add three major improvements to the iBooks application. iBooks now includes the following functionality:

1. Users can now highlight text and enter notes for annotations.
2. Bookmarks have been added which are accessible through the eBooks contents page.
3. iBooks now supports PDFs.

I believe these three additional functions are very important. Especially the new PDF functionality.

I honestly believe that the future of iPads and tablet device is in higher education. I do believe that a time will come a time when lectures will produce notes optimised for tablet possibly as PDFs which students download for classes. Textbooks will be purchased as ePub eBooks and lectures will be recorded published as podcasts for download after the session.

I think that we are starting to witness the pulling together of many different technologies which form an incredible powerful learning materials. To find out more read about iBooks.

Links

1. iBooks - A novel way to buy and read books. Now on iPhone.

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