Reinventing Textbooks With iBooks 2

Recently, Apple announced its new application for iPad that will provide amazing way to download and read books. The new application is called iBooks 2. In order to have iBooks 2 application, there are some requirements that have to fulfill. The iBooks 2 is available to be downloaded for free in iOS App Store. It comes with automatic bookmark synchronizing feature that requires an active Wi-Fi or cellular data connection and an Apple ID.

It can be said that iBooks 2 is reinventing textbook. Textbooks have become our learning tools however they are not the most ideal one. Textbooks cannot last forever as they get easily damaged from water, dust and time. Moreover, they are not interactive and not easily searchable for sure, making many people especially students, rarely open textbooks. Reading a thousand-pages textbooks may become a very boring activity as they only come with plain text. That’s why now people especially young generation and students seem to have lack interest in reading textbooks and lazily learning.

iBooks 2

On the other hand, iBooks 2 offer more attractive textbooks that will increase reading interest as well as learning process. They are not just bringing a fullscreen textbook with plain texts like original textbook. They do more than that by bring up textbooks with interactive animations, photos, videos and diagrams. In addition, the textbooks come with new features such as virtual study cards, interactive multiple choice questions for section and book quizzes, a revised index for easier search, page thumbnails and new portrait and landscape views. In landscape mode of iBooks 2, the textbooks appear with embedded interactive contents such as videos, charts, and 3d models. Rotate to portrait view, the content will split; the textbooks are isolated in a layout while the interactive contents are shifted to the left hand side. Tap and zoom are accessible to all contents.

Searching certain content from the textbook is very easy; you can browse thumbnails, swipe from page to page or use iBooks 2 search features – just type the terms, keywords or pages of the textbook. You can add notes and highlighting content of the textbooks. To highlight the content, just swipe to highlight, and tap to change the highlight color. Notes and highlights can be converted into new Study Card that helps you to learn. You can also use them as flash cards with glossary terms and brief definitions using a built-in shuffle mode. 

Like the paper one, textbooks in iBooks 2 also come with typical end-of-book quizzes. The quizzes appear in multiple-choice questions with illustrated answers, and immediate feedback for the user. You can download other textbooks via iBookstore but currently they are only eight textbooks available. You may add textbooks outside the iBookstore but the textbooks should be DRM-free and synced using iTunes 9.2 or later. Not all of documents format are supported by iBooks 2 as it is only supports books made with iBooks Author, ePub books and PDF documents. The textbooks on iBooks 2 are currently only available on iPad.