350,000 Textbooks for iPad Downloaded in Three Days

Last Thursday, Apple took the stage at Guggenheim Museum in New York City to unveil its new educational content and publishing tools based on the iBooks platform. The event was centered around the releases of iBooks 2, iTunes U for iOS, and iBooks Author for Mac. And, as reported by AllThingsD, the response to the company’s educational efforts has been nothing short of phenomenal.

According to Global Equities Research, upwards of 350,000 interactive textbooks for iPad were downloaded from the iBookstore during the first three days of availability. iBooks Author, Apple’s free textbook creation tool for Mac, also had just shy of 100,000 downloads during its opening weekend. Best of all, it’s a win-win situation for both students and publishers…

Traditional publishers must work with distributors and wholesalers to get their textbooks on bookstore shelves, which adds upwards of 30% in markup to the price of the textbooks. Apple’s digital platform, however, allows for publishers to put their textbooks in the hands of consumers for cheaper, by cutting off its reliance on the supply chain. Furthermore, the production cost of an interactive iBooks textbook is nearly 80% less than a paperback textbook. It just makes sense!

“[This is] a recipe for Apple’s success in the textbook industry,” said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry.

The end result is higher profit margins for publishers, and cheaper textbook prices for students. And who doesn’t like that?

[AllThingsD]