Apple has organized an “education announcement” that will take place at the Guggenheim museum in New York on Thursday. While the details of the event remain a mystery, internet speculation is pointing to the release of a “GarageBand for e-books” software that will allow authors to publish direct-to-digital content.
In the same way that GarageBand allowed musicians to record and produce mp3s on their own, and iMovie helped Mom and Pop take the next step in home-movie production, Apple is seemingly poised to release an application that will make publishing eBooks and textbooks directly to iPad affordable for publishers and authors alike.
Across the country, tens of thousands of iPads have been purchased by K-12 schools and libraries with digital learning in mind. Many of those institutions have found they’re all dressed up with nowhere to go. The iPad is a potential gold-mine for Apple in the education sector, but without the right content, it’s little more than a paper weight- or worse- an angry-bird-tossing distraction.
Next week: Blogging from Digital Book World!