The Future Comes to Education

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of what Apple announced this morning in New York:

Digital textbooks available for iBooks 2 on iPad will come at a significant discount over regular paper-based books, with prices at $14.99 or less from major publishers like McGraw Hill and Pearson.

Titles announced at Thursday’s media event from Pearson include Algebra I, Biology, Environmental Science, Geometry. These titles are used by more than 4 million high school students.

McGraw Hill is also on board, Apple’s Phil Schiller revealed. They are offering Algebra I, Biology, Chemistry, Geometry and Physics titles as of today on the iBookstore with iBooks 2.

$14.99 or less for textbooks, with major publishers already on board. And these are improved, multimedia textbooks, not mere PDFs of existing books.

UPDATE: Video of these things in action here, and it’s impressive.