Apple expands iBooks Textbooks around the world
The company is also broadening the reach of its iTunes U Course Manager, which helps teachers design and distribute their own customized courses.
Apple has aimed two of its educational offerings at more schools, teachers, and students throughout the world.
iBooks Textbooks and iTunes U Course Manager have both rolled out to new markets in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, Apple said on Tuesday. iBooks Textbooks is now available in 51 countries, including Brazil, Italy, and Japan. iTunes U Course Manager can be found in 70 countries, now including Russia, Thailand, and Malaysia.
iBooks Textbooks offers iPad users interactive textbooks with straight text, animations, videos, rotating 3D diagrams, and photo galleries, all of which can be updated when new information is available. Almost 25,000 textbooks are available from such publishers as Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, according to Apple.
"Oxford University Press is using iBooks Author for Headway, Oxford's all-time best-selling English language series, to create engaging iBooks Textbooks for iPad," Peter Marshall, managing director of the ELT Division at Oxford University Press, said in a statement. "In releasing 13 new iBooks Textbooks, including 'Headway Pre-Intermediate,' the best-selling level in the series, we are enriching the language learning experience for students around the world."
iTunes U Course Manager lets teachers and others create their own course material for the iPad. They can combine their own documents with content from the Internet, other iTunes U collections, and iOS apps to design their own courses. Teachers can then distribute those courses to their own classrooms or post them via iTunes U for the public to access.