Can’t wait for high school calculus iBooks where kids have to triangulate Kindle sales with rubbish percentage data

– Dan Frommer, via Twitter

“Volume,” says McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw, which is the usual answer for this kind of digital question. But there’s an important asterisk here, too. Normally, McGraw-Hill would sell its books directly to public schools, which would keep the texts for an average of five years.

Under Apple’s new textbooks plan, though, McGraw-Hill will try something different: It will sell its books directly to each student (the student could either pay out of pocket, or the school could fund the purchase via a voucher/code), who will use the book for a year, then move on. They’ll be able to keep the digital text, but won’t be able to resell it or pass it along to another student, and McGraw-Hill anticipates that another set of students will buy new books the following year.

So Terry McGraw figures that over five years he’ll generate the same total sales selling $15 e-books as he would selling $75 books. It’s not a total push, because in this model, Apple will take an undisclosed cut of sales — McGraw-Hill execs wouldn’t go into details, so let’s assume for now that it’s Apple’s standard 30 percent — but presumably McGraw-Hill can make some of that up by forgoing the costs of print and distribution.

(It’s important to note that all of this is about the high school textbook market, for now. While McGraw-Hill and other publishers sell college texts through other digital platforms, they still haven’t announced plans to do so with Apple.)

All of that assumes that the book pricing stays at $15. After Apple’s event, McGraw-Hill executives repeatedly used the phrase “pilot pricing” to describe their near-term plans. And they told me that they have the ability to change the price when and if they want.

But when I posed the same question to Apple media boss Eddy Cue just now, I got a much different response. “This isn’t pilot pricing,” he said. “All of our books will be $14.99.”

Joining the company in this new effort: McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a publishing triumvirate that produces the majority of textbooks currently available. “We have had some phenomenal companies really work with us,” Apple SVP Phil Schiller said this morning. “They have been great partners with us.”

Indeed, all three seem to have bought into Apple’s textbook pricing plan, which is something of a miracle. High school textbook prices in the iBookstore’s new textbook category: $14.99 or less.

9:34 am: We’ve arrived. Here’s the scene outside the Guggenheim Museum.

9:43 am: As we wait for the event to get started, here are some “CliffsNotes” on what we might see from Apple today.

9:45 am: Hi there, from Peter! Lauren Goode and I, along with a couple hundred other people, are still stuck in the stairwell of the museum, waiting to be seated.

9:50 am: Line is moving slowly now.

9:52 am: Hello there. Apple has let us into the Guggenheim’s basement auditorium.

Just spotted McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw in the audience. Not sure if he’s sitting with us, or will be popping up onstage.

9:54 am: Ah. I see that the American corporate mandate to play Adele at every event has continued into 2012. So we are still rolling in the deep.

We could have had it all, you know.

9:57 am: Lights down. Adele still belting.

9:58 am: First up: Apple marketing head Phil Schiller.

“Education is deep in our DNA, and it has been from the very beginning.”

Apple has a unique understanding of learning, student achievement. “We’re so proud to take part in anything we can do to help students learn.”

New change in schools via iPad is “profound and remarkable.”

Shot of toddler watching Dora on iPad, which looks very familiar.

But education has challenges, “which are pretty profound.”

Life is tough for high school kids in the U.S. Freshmen have a 70 percent chance of graduating. In “hard-hit urban areas,” that’s 60 percent.

Even if you do graduate, you probably won’t be prepared to compete internationally. List of poor showing by U.S. in world education rankings.

Now a video reel of teachers bemoaning the state of affairs, backed up by swelling music track.

Basic message: Schools are in lousy shape. “We need a reset. We need a way to find out what’s wrong, and fix it,” says last teacher, in a nice sweater.

Schiller is back. “No one person or company can try to fix it all.” But Apple can help. Specifically with “student engagement.”

Of course, kids like iPads, Schiller says. Extolls virtues of iPad, which we don’t need to tell you about here. “Affordable, not only for families but for schools.”

20,000+ education apps built specifically for iPad.

And lots of iBooks would work very nicely in schools, too.

1.5 million iPads in use in “education institutions.” We want to accelerate that. So we’re announcing two initiatives:

10:06 am: 1) “Reinventing textbooks.”

Books are awesome. They’ve transformed society and will always be with us. But they’re not an ideal learning tool for kids. Cumbersome, get dog-eared, “written-in, worn, just not the ideal teaching tool.” Image of badly-beaten book.

Books aren’t portable enough. Not durable enough. Not interactive. Not searchable. Can’t be updated. “The content is great,” though.

10:07 am: But the iPad? That’s awesome. It’s all of those things that a lowly book is not.

But “can you get amazing content turned into a new generation of digital books?”

10:08 am: So here is iBooks 2 — a “new textbook experience for the iPad.”

“These are beautiful books.” Here’s a demo, with Roger Rosner, who has helped build the new product.

Biologist E.O. Wilson introduces a new digital textbook, which features multitouch, video, navigation via thumbnails, etc. “These are gorgeous, gorgeous books. They’re really in a class by themselves.”

“Clearly, no printed textbook could compete with this.”

Lots of pinchy-zoomy. “Again, nothing like that on the printed page.”

So here I will point out that the most obvious issue is the same one that magazine publishers faced during the initial iPad launch — someone needs to figure out how to pay for a system where you can build all this new cool digital stuff, while you continue to publish your old paper-and-ink products. After some initial experiments, most magazine guys have retreated to more or less republishing the existing product, with a few bells and whistles.

Okay, back to Rosner, still demoing cool stuff like interactive text that lets you access a glossary by highlighting a word. “That is so much better than a paper glossary could ever hope to be.”

10:14 am: Hopefully, the pictures that Lauren Goode is taking give you a good idea of what Rosner is showing off. This stuff does look gorgeous, of course.

Half the crowd applauds.

10:15 am: Still demoing. Quizzes and review questions built into book. “The bottom line is immediate feedback.”

Can highlight text with finger, change color, etc. Add notes.

10:17 am: Turn notes into study cards. Can turn glossary terms into study cards. “No more ever having to make paper flash cards, right?”

More applause for card demo. “I don’t think there’s a textbook that’s ever made it this easy to be a good student.”

New textbook category in iBookstore.

10:20 am: Demo over, Schiller back up. Summarizes selling points.

10:20 am: Now on to creation. “That’s just as important.”

iBooks Author (i.e., what people have been calling “GarageBand for books”).

“Easy to use, feature-rich,” will work for any kind of book, not just textbooks. But “focused most of all” on textbooks.

10:21 am: Rosner back up. “Traditionally, creating electronic interactive books has been really hard.” We can fix that.

Uses some familiar iWork workflow. Drag and drop. Can type into editor or bring in Word files, etc.

More applause after program reformats and flows Word doc.

This looks very slick and easy. No surprise there.

Ah. I can now see that McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw is in the audience, soaking it in with the rest of us.

Can integrate Keynote into text. More applause for that.

Rosner still demoing. If you’ve ever been involved in making e-books before, “you know that this is a total miracle in terms of time savings.”

More applause for fast turnaround between creation and working book showing up on iPad. “I just think that’s totally awesome, right? In just five minutes flat, we created a totally interactive book.”

More applause, and some excited hoots.

10:29 am: Schiller back. “Anyone can create stunning, interactive books.”

Authoring tools “often cost hundreds to thousands of dollars.” But we want to make sure that anyone can use this — even teachers. New iBooks Author will be free.

Available today on Mac App Store. More applause.

Reminder that iBookstore will have new textbooks category.

Partners (this is key part).

High school textbooks. Will launch at $14.99 or less.

Names of publishers? Have yet to hear from Schiller.

Here we go: “We have had some phenomenal companies really work with us”: Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “They have been great partners with us.”

McGraw-Hill, for instance, wil be providing algebra, biology, chemistry books, etc. “They are incredible.”

“Can’t overemphasize” how important it is for publishers to work with us.

Also working with DK Publishing. Four new kids’ books.

Another partner: E.O Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. “If you don’t know E.O. Wilson, you should.” More applause.

First chapters of “Life on Earth” are available now, for free. Future chapters will be available at low price.

And now, a video. “We couldn’t help ourselves … I hope you enjoy it.”

More hopeful teachers and music this time out.

So while video is rolling, let’s review: By far the most important announcement today is that Apple has partnered with three of the big textbook publishers. Don’t have details on that, but the fact that this isn’t a flat-out end run around the textbook industry is crucial. Obvious parallel here is iTunes music launch in 2003, when Apple worked with the big labels instead.

Eddy Cue, who many of us thought would be at event, shows up in video, instead.

And Terry McGraw is in the video, as well.

So is Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino.

John Deasy, superintendent for Los Angeles Unified School District.

10:44 am: Video over, more applause. Ah. Schiller has more. Here comes Eddy Cue.

10:45 am: As John Paczkowski noted early this month, Apple is overhauling iTunes U.

700 million downloads of iTunes U content in the last four years. So far, mostly used to download college lectures. (I’m responsible for one of them! A Robert Shiller talk I keep meaning to listen to.)

“We want to let teachers do a whole lot more.” Create entire classes online. Via all-new iTunes U app.

Jeff Robbin, VP of iTunes, for demo.

Not just books, but “new complete, online courses.” Here’s a chemistry course from Duke University.

Some of this is gunning at Blackboard, the college standard for online education software, which lots of people (users and would-be competitors) would like to disrupt.

Ability for teachers to post notes for students, download videos to iPad or stream, etc.

Demo over, more applause. Hard to explain/see how this will work unless you’re actively using it within the context of school, I think.

Cue rattles off list of colleges using iTunes U already. Six of them have used the new software — Duke, Stanford, Yale — and have created more than 100 courses already. “All of it for free.”

So far, mostly used for higher education. But now available for K-12. More applause.

10:54 am: Cue off, Schiller back.

Love of education “has been instilled in Apple since the very beginning. And it’s as true today as it ever was before.”

“We hope that educators will look back on today’s announcements just as fondly” as past Apple education initiatives.

“I hope you’re as excited about these announcements as we are.” Schiller finishes up, event over.

Thanks for tuning in. We’ll now get a chance to play with some of this stuff hands-on, and I’m going to talk to at least one of the publisher partners Apple talked about today. More in a bit.

Chegg, which sells and rents physical and digital textbooks, is rolling out a souped-up version of its digital textbook reader, which is browser-based and built using HTML5. That means it should play nicely with Apple’s iPad in particular, but also Google Android tablets, Amazon’s Kindle Fire or any other device, mobile or not, as long as they’re plugged into an active Web connection.

The new reader also integrates features from some of the companies Chegg has been snapping up in the past few years, like a Q&A service that will come bundled with each text. This video should show off some bells and whistles:

Chegg’s news underscores the fact that Apple’s entry into the market hasn’t been held up by technical issues. And it’s not that the big textbook players refuse to publish their books in digital form: Kno is also publishing digital texts from the big guys. So is Amazon. And Barnes & Noble. Etc.

But big publishers aren’t in any hurry to fundamentally disrupt their existing businesses. Which is why their digital books look a whole lot like their print books, except that the digital books are priced below their print counterparts, to account for the fact that they can’t be resold.

And even if the publishers did want to reboot, there are ossified bureaucracies throughout the education system that make it nearly impossible to quickly adopt new technologies, let alone new texts. Digital textbooks may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean they have to get here overnight.

So if Apple’s big news Thursday is that it’s rolling out tools to let people create their own textbooks, GarageBand-style, then that may look like an end run — an effort to restart the business by bypassing lots of entrenched players. But I’d like to wait and see who Eddy Cue brings up onstage Thursday before I’m convinced of that.

Google calls its effort “Good to Know,” and it’s a continuation of a campaign that began in Europe in the fall. Beyond the obligatory website, which features how-to videos, the campaign incorporates online and print advertisements in newspapers and magazines nationwide as well as advertisements for straphangers in New York and Washington D.C. subway stations. Google says Good to Know is its largest consumer education campaign. A Google spokesman said the company is spending “tens of millions of dollars.”

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One area of literacy that’s changing is the order in which things are presented — it isn’t linear, it’s organised spatially, and often some meaning is carried in the design, layout, images, sounds, movement, subtle changes in colour in a game — it’s all part of what literacy is in today’s world. These are fundamental changes to operational literacy, the biggest since the printing press.

– Dr. Rosie Flewitt of the Educational Dialogue Research Unit at the Open University, in conversation with Stewart Mitchell of PCPro about how keeping computers from children at an early age may deprive them of modern communication skills

When you look at all the prophecies about the future that have come true in the span of just 20 years — and now at the growing cadre of online education start-ups that have cropped up — it’s time to check in with the legend behind it all: The late, great science-fiction author Isaac Asimov.

As you will see from the video below (from an interview with Bill Moyers), what Asimov said, way back when, is finally coming true.

Of course.

It’s a bit long, but well worth your time:

Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt will join the board of Kno, the online education start-up.

He is currently the principal at REH Advisors.

The Silicon Valley-based Kno began its life offering a student-aimed tablet and education platform, but now is focusing solely on the software part of its business.

The company announced plans this summer to allow those who buy textbooks from Kno to read them on Facebook and via the Web. It also has an Apple iPad app that takes the product beyond just an electronic version of a traditional textbook.

Kno’s current backers include prominent venture players like Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital, along with investors Mike Maples and Ron Conway. Marc Andreessen, as well as co-founders Osman Rashid (also CEO) and Babur Habib (also CTO), are also on its board.

Here is the official press release about Hundt’s appointment as a Kno director:

FORMER FCC CHAIRMAN REED HUNDT JOINS KNO INC.’S BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Hundt Brings Unparalleled Experience in Education and Communications

Santa Clara, CA, November 1, 2011 — Today, Kno, Inc., www.kno.com, a pioneer in education software, announced that the company has named Reed Hundt, former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to its Board of Directors.

“I’m very excited to join Kno’s Board of Directors because the company shares my passion for education,” said Reed Hundt. “While I was at the FCC, one of my highest priorities was making sure our nation’s classrooms were connected to the Internet, precisely in order to foster a software revolution in learning. I believe that Kno’s student-focused software will bring education into the 21st century and help transform the way students learn now and in the future.”

Hundt brings decades of relevant experience to Kno’s Board and is a long-time advocate for technological innovation in education. He is currently the Principal at REH Advisors, an advisory firm that serves clients on a variety of issues. Prior to establishing REH Advisors, Hundt served as an Adviser to McKinsey and Company for more than 10 years, as well as a Member of the National Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, among other distinguished roles.

Hundt served as Chairman of the FCC from 1993-1997 and played a major role in implementing the Snowe-Rockefeller program that directs more than $4 billion annually to connect all classrooms to the Internet and is hailed as one of the largest single national commitments to K-12 education in American history.

“The work Reed accomplished while Chairman of the FCC makes him an exceptional addition to our Board and his expansive knowledge of the education technology space will serve Kno tremendously in its efforts to improve how students learn,” said Osman Rashid, co-Founder and CEO of Kno, Inc.

Babur Habib, co-Founder and CTO of Kno, Inc. continued, “Hundt brings decades of relevant experience to Kno’s Board and is a long-time advocate for technological innovation in education. We look forward to working closely with Reed to help guide us as we extend our reach to professors and administrators.”

Hundt has also taught seminars at the Yale Law School, Yale School of Management, Yale College, and Columbia Business and Law Schools, demonstrating his passion of education. He also serves on the Boards of Intel Corporation, Serious Energy and UNCF, an educational assistance organization.

Hundt holds a B.A. in History from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He also is the author of “In China’s Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship and You Say You Want a Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics.”

A new survey of educational technology directors found virtually all of them testing or deploying Pads in their schools.

Notably, none of them were testing or deploying Android tablets.

Now to be clear, this was a small survey. The sample size was only 25 — though, as noted by Gene Munster, the Piper Jaffray analyst who conducted it, the population of IT decision makers in the education field isn’t exactly vast. So that 100 percent metric is more a directional indicator than anything else.

Still, it does anecdotally confirm a larger trend, one Apple noted during the numbers portion of its last big media event. Nearly 1,000 K-12 schools have an iPad one-to-one program. In other words, at minimum, they are providing an entire classroom of students with their own iPads to use throughout their school day.

Other metrics reinforce that trend. Apple says that currently every state in the U.S. has a K-12 iPad education pilot program or deployment in place. And more than 2,300 K-12 school districts in the United States are running iPad programs for students or faculty, among them New York City and Chicago.

So Apple is beginning to deliver on the promise of handheld education. And as more educational content is customized for the iPad, it’s not hard to imagine the device gaining even more traction in the school market. At $499 before typical educator and student discounts, the iPad is price competitive with most PCs that schools currently purchase, which suggests Apple may be poised to capture a significant percentage of the developing tablet market in education.

As Munster observes, the schools and school districts in his sample currently have about 10 students per computer. But within the next five years, their educational technology directors expect them to have six students per tablet. And by “tablet,” says Munster, he means iPad, because the two were effectively synonymous in his survey.

Looks like Ron Johnson — the merchandising guru who created Apple’s retail stores and recently left the company for the CEO gig at J.C. Penney — may have been right when he predicted that the current generation of students may prove to be the last one with backpacks.

iKnow, demoed today at AsiaD, aims to be just such an innovator.

The product was billed as a “personal learning assistant” that calculates an individualized study schedule based on a user’s learning and retention patterns.

Algorithms determine the best order in which to learn a set of “items” (a foreign word or phrase, for example), and, more important, the best time for the user to review the items already learned.

“Research has shown that there is an optimum moment to review whatever you’re studying, and that moment is right before you’re likely to forget it,” said Andrew Smith Lewis, co-founder of iKnow developer Cerego.

iKnow hopes to take the guesswork out of the equation and tell students exactly when their brains are primed for a review.

The user interface includes a dashboard with each of the student’s classes, as well as study targets, progress trackers and an upcoming study schedule. Students can turn on email study reminders to avoid falling behind.

Optional Android and iPhone apps can sync with the user’s computer.

The company’s demo unveiled its latest development, a text-parsing tool that will allow users to capture content from blogs or articles and use that text to customize a learning session.

The program extracts the most important words in the article and adds them to the user’s study list. It’s currently aimed at English-learners in Japan, but also offers an extensive core of Japanese-language instruction and a nascent Chinese core.

Businesses and schools can sign up for a subscription service that allows a group of students or employees to interact in a given class.

And therein lies perhaps the most useful feature of iKnow: Administrators can get access to analytics showing the progress of individual students and the entire group. This could help teachers get beyond blank stares to see which concepts students are grasping and which segments may need more time.

Video and photos from the demo below.