Last week Apple had an event related to education, that unveiled both the Author app and the iBooks 2 platform, that will provide textbooks to students worldwide. This initiative proved to be so popular that it drew quite a crow around it, with 350k textbooks being downloaded from iBooks in 3 days.
The info comes from the Global Equities Research company, that monitors Apple’s iBooks sales through a proprietary tracking system. Meanwhile, we find out that iBooks Author has also been downloaded about 90k times and in case you didn’t know this is a free tool for textbook creation. Considering these numbers, Apple has a great start with this initiative and textbook publishers should also be happy, since I guess they wouldn’t have sold 350k units not even in busy week before school starts.
Global Equities Research says that the supply chain markup on textbooks goes from 33% to 35%, so there’s a lot to save here, by cutting out fees from the usual distributors and wholesalers. iBooks production also has a lower cost and research estimates that 80% of the cost is blown away and that was usually money spent in print publication. Apple has hit it big… one more time.
