Apple to launch e-texbooks at education event?

Last week we reported about Apple sending out invitations to an “education event” in New York this Thursday, and while there has been speculations about what the event will be about – the Wall Street Journal and Ars Tecnicha seem to have confirmation about the event’s agenda, provided that their inside sources are on the dot. According to the WSJ, Apple’s event will be focusing on the launch of a new platform for digital textbooks. Apparently Apple has been working together with textbook publishers, McGraw-Hill and Cengage Learning, on this platform for quite some time now.

In addition to the launch of its textbook platform, Ars Technica reported that Apple will also be releasing tools to create digital textbooks on the platform. Touted as “GarageBand for eBooks”, it’s supposed to simplify the process of creating eBooks, opening up the platform to a lot more users and independent publishers who would like to give digital publishing a shot. As usual, we won’t confirm anything until it is official but thankfully, January 19^th is only a few days away so we won’t have to wait too long to find out. Stay tuned.