textbooks

Tuesday's top tech stories are out to disrupt your world:

Oh Amazon, what don't you do? Well cross off game development, as it just launched its own studio to make Facebook games and compete with Zynga. It also joined the textbook rental service to face off with eBay's Half.com and BookRenter.

YouTube will no longer be a pre-loaded default app on Apple devices. Apple is dropping the YouTube app for iOS 6, and Google will create a separate app you can download. It's all part of Apple's mission to distance itself from Google.

If … Read more

The purchase, reported by several local media outlets, is said to be one of the largest educational iPad rollouts in the U.S. K-12 market. The 26,000 iPads will be spread out in 340 classrooms starting this fall.

Apple's push to get iPads and digital textbooks in the classroom appears to be paying off. The SDUSD was able to draw on funding though Proposition S, a fund approved in 2008 by a 69 percent vote, dedicated to getting classrooms up-to-date technology.

The iPad is nothing if not up-to-date. And, despite some local head-scratching (read: "Why would we … Read more

What would you do if you found a bag of white powder tucked neatly into the textbook you just bought on the Amazon Marketplace?

If you're smart, you'd take it to the police like Sophia Stockton, a junior at a university in Kansas who discovered something similar in the pages of a history book called "Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives and Issues."

While we're on the topic of narcotics, don't forget to tune into President Obama's Q+A on Google+ Hangout tonight at 5:30 p.m. ET, live from the West Wing of … Read more

Popular file-sharing site FileSonic limits use after the MegaUpload arrests, Obama uses Google+ Hangout, and Research In Motion's co-CEOs resign to make way for a new leader.

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

Since digital textbooks are still in their infancy, it might be tough to determine success in that market just yet. But so far, it appears Apple is doing quite well.

The iPhone maker reportedly sold 350,000 digital textbooks through its iBookstore in just its first three days of availability, Global Equities Research has revealed, according to All Things Digital, which obtained the data from the analyst firm. Global Equities Research monitors textbook downloads through its own "proprietary tracking system," All Things Digital said today. The firm doesn't disclose how that system works.

Last week, Apple unveiled digital textbooks for its iPad. … Read more

Apple's new digital textbook initiative is Steve Jobs' brainchild, McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw says.

"Sitting and listening to all of this, I wish Steve Jobs was here," McGraw told All Things Digital in an interview referring to Apple's iBooks 2 announcement yesterday. "I was with him in June this past year, and we were talking about some of the benchmarks, and some of the things that we were trying to do together...This was his vision, this was his idea, and it all had to do with the iPad."

Apple yesterday unveiled its plans … Read more

In an Apple event this morning in New York, Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, took the stage to introduce iBooks 2, an update to the popular e-reader for iOS devices that adds textbooks.

As Apple's flagship e-reader, iBooks is already a crisp-looking app and storefront that runs on iOS devices. But today, iBooks 2 moves into the world of education by adding interactive textbooks with the aim of keeping students' attention (and certainly adding yet another revenue stream for Apple). … Read more

Textbooks aren't a terribly sexy topic, but give it to Apple for trying to make it sexy.

Yes, today Apple officially rolled out an upgraded 2.0 version of its iBooks app that now supports interactive textbooks while also releasing a free Mac application, iBook Author, that lets people create electronic textbooks on their computers.

Seems clear enough, right? Apple jumps headlong into an entrenched, inefficient industry, threatening it with "digital destruction," or, to put it another way, textbook go boom.

But the truth is, the announcements stirred up more questions than they answered. So with that … Read more

The format of today's episode is a little different, as we discuss all the products to come out of Apple's Education Event at the Guggenheim Museum here in New York, along with Bridget Carey who reports from the field on iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and the revamped iTunes U platform.

Even after the press conference is over, we're still left with questions about hardware deployment and format compatibility, so CNET's David Carnoy joins us as well to give his take on the e-publishing industry and the challenges Apple will face alongside district budget cuts and existing … Read more