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Apple Education Event

Apple has managed an upcoming event on this Thursday, January 19th. In which the giant company will reveal its latest plans in digital textbooks through the iBookstore. Some speculated Apple will make the digital books publishing more attractive to authors — think “GarageBand for eBooks.”

Apple is said to be working with major publishers since June. McGraw-Hill is one of them. According to The Wall Street Journal:

McGraw-Hill Cos., Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are among the education-publishing companies most likely affected by an Apple textbook announcement. The companies have experimented with interactive approaches, such as allowing students to take quizzes as they read and hear audio for foreign-language study, but many digital textbooks have looked a lot like their physical counterparts.

McGraw-Hill has been working with Apple on its announcement since June, a person familiar with the matter said. It wasn’t known whether Pearson and Houghton Mifflin also would participate.

According to Ars Technica’s, Apple will unveil “GarageBand for eBooks” on January 19th.

At the same time, however, authoring standards-compliant e-books (despite some promises to the contrary) is not as simple as running a Word document of a manuscript through a filter. The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand.

Our sources say Apple will announce such a tool on Thursday.

Steve Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson that he wanted to revolutionize textbooks and make them digital and interactive. We are about to see that vision come true.