Last week, The Next Web reported that Tuesday’s iPad mini event was going to have a heavy focus on iBooks. This made some sense, considering the tablet’s size and price is expected to put it up against other e-readers.
Today, the site adds weight to its story by posting a screenshot of an apparent leak in an e-book listing in Apple’s iTunes Store. We’ve got the image after the break, note that it says “this book requires iBooks 3.0 or later.”
If you’ve been keeping track, you’ll know that the current version of iBooks is 2.0, which Apple introduced earlier this year. The find is attributed to iGen.fr, and was reposted by The Next Web with the following explanation:
“Developers can set certain requirements for their submissions, including hardware bits that are necessary to operate the app, and those are used to generate that section. But they cannot manually alter the text there, as it is generated by iTunes, so that rules out a typo on behalf of the submitting developer. This was definitely generated on Apple’s end of things.”
So this could mean one of two things. One, there was a typo on Apple’s end. Or two, it’s a leak and iTunes is already seeing iBooks 3.0 as a publication option. And that begs the question, why would a book “require” iBooks 3.0?
Maybe it has something to do with hardware. As you know, in addition to the iPad mini, Apple is expected to unveil a new MacBook, and refreshed Mac desktops next week. And there has also been talk of a retooled iPad 3.
Or maybe iBooks 3.0 is going to build on Apple’s education ambitions, which it talked about a lot at its New York event back in February this year. It seems like it’s been a while since we’ve heard about iBooks Author or iTunes U.
Either way, next week’s event just got a little bit more interesting. The festivities kick off at 10am PST on Tuesday morning, and as always, we’ll be bringing you all the action as it happens. So make sure to tune in!