Apple is rumoured to be on the verge of unveiling “the GarageBand for eBooks”. According to renowned tech news site Ars Technica, the unveiling will take place during a special educational event being held by the Cupertino-based giant.
Ars Technica believes that, “Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books” at the event, which is at least partially aimed at strengthening relationships between itself and the textbook publishing industry.
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Apple uses the ePub2 standard for its iBooks platform. Various Html 5 extensions, however, mean that it has been able to include limited interactivity in the form of video and audio.
The downside of these extensions is that they make iBook formatted e-books incompatible with other e-readers.
In a bid to mitigate these issues Apple is migrating to the EPub 3 standard going forward. The current process for publishing an article nonetheless remains frustrating for authors and publishers alike.
The product Apple is set to unveil on Thursday will reportedly make publishing an e-book as simple as creating a song in GarageBand.
Ars Technica reckons that, while Apple might not want to get into the content creation business itself, the upcoming product may well leverage its experience as an industry leader when it comes to tools for content production such Logic or Final Cut Pro. These tools, are, however, leveraged mostly at professionals and the e-book tool may well be more GrarageBand or iMovie, both of which make high level production accessible to a much wider audience”.
Ars Technica also cites the fact that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs “believed that textbook publishing was an ‘$8-billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction” and that he “was working on addressing learning and digital textbooks for some time, according to Walter Issacson’s biography” as evidence that Apple could be launching a game changing product at its upcoming educational event.
