Since we were kids, our parents constantly reminded us how important education is in life. And Apple shares our parents’ thoughts, as they launched iBooks 2 during an event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York today.

Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of world-wide marketing, unveiled iBooks 2 – the next-generation content store for e-books.

“These are beautiful books. Interactive, gorgeous, fun, engaging. Kids are really going to love to learn with textbooks in iBooks,” said Schiller.

Apple’s interest in revolutionizing textbooks spurs from the need to change the type of educational content that exists in the market nowadays.  There are lots of companies offering digital textbooks like CourseSmart, Kno, Inkling, and Amazon so what makes iBooks different?

What makes iBooks stand out

iBooks Author – an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks, and just about any other kind of book, for iPads. Books made with iBooks Author can be laced with galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, and more, to bring life to reading materials in a way that printed textbooks could never have.

Aside from iBooks and iBooks Author, Apple also introduced iBooks Textbooks – a new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, current, engrossing, and truly interactive.  iBook Textbooks are created by publishers using iBooks Author to bring life to written materials for the iPad.  These educational, student-oriented e-books will appear in the iBookstore under the new heading: Textbooks.  This section of the iBookstore will include high school level books, and more in due time, priced at $14.99 or less.

Though this new Apple venture may seem threatening to big publishing houses like Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Apple is said to be working with them to create cheaper, more accessible e-book content.

A digital threat to publishers’ world

E-books have been threatening the existence of publishing houses, especially with more people opting for digital versions of books, because they are cheaper and readers only need one reading device to enjoy thousands of books, magazines, news articles, etc.  And with more school textbooks available as e-textbooks, students are relieved that they do not need to haul big, bulky textbooks to school everyday.  Though this is detrimental for publishing houses and book junkies, just think of it this way: less books, less trash, less trees to be cut down – a step closer in the hopes of ending global warming.  Digital publishers will have to adapt in the same fashion that the music and film industry has done.