iBooks 2: An Outcome of Steve Jobs’ Vision for Revolutionizing Textbooks! McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw

iBooks 2 is really very impressive and highly admirable effort from Apple for revolutionizing textbooks by turning them from boredom to interactive ones. iBooks 2, is the outcome of the vision of Steve Jobs who dreamed for game changing devices like iTV and iCam. Now McGraw-Hill CEO, Terry McGraw, pays tribute to RIP Steve Jobs for being initiator of highly improved and most fascinating digital textbooks for the students to boost of the level of American education system. During a Q&A session, just after the Apple’s “Education Announcement Event” for iBooks 2 release, McGraw  shared some of his views over the development of iBooks 2 and described Steve Jobs’ vision for what textbooks should be like.

Sitting and listening to all of this, I wish Steve Jobs was here. 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. He should be here. He probably is [gesturing up and around]. This was his vision, this was his idea, and it all had to do with the iPad.

Steve Jobs’ vision and dream of reinventing textbooks is now an obvious well known and confirmed fact. Jobs’ had initially worked on this idea and had made some conversations with prominent publishers like Pearson on how to make textbooks more interactive and interesting for the students with the help of technology.

On the other hand, a former Apple intern, Joseph Peter, has made some stunning claim by saying that the idea of digital textbooks at Apple was first floated by him. Noting on history of digital books at Apple, Peter claimed at The Wirecutter that he is the man who should be actually credited for iBooks 2 revelation since it is based on the idea of interactive digital textbooks which was given by him back in 2008 as a part of an “iContest” in which Apple interns gathered float their ideas to Apple’s second lead executives.

Peter also noted that the textbook ideas suggested by him and his group were considerably appreciated by Apple’s judges, and his team was awarded a MacBook Air and they were granted an access to higher-level management to discuss the ideas.

Anyway, we presented and answered the Q&A pretty flawlessly. I mean they said they really liked it and every other presentation received mostly sarcastic remarks.

I remember answering a handful of questions and getting the impression that the exec’s were totally on board. It was a pretty awesome feeling. [...]

At the end, they announced that we won, they gave us all a MacBook Air and it was great (for interns anyway). I was more excited about the opportunity to talk to more people about the idea. They scheduled a meeting with John Couch, head of Education a few days later. We met John and a few the people on his team in a small board room and we just gave the same pitch as before.

We think Peters and his group’s idea was not the origin of the Apple’s textbook plans, since Apple was already working on it. However, Peter’s note is a beautiful reminder by an Apple intern that discloses Apple’s keenness in developing highly interactive digital textbooks even in 2008, almost prior to more than a year before the appearance of Apple’s original iPad on tech horizons.

via: AllthingsD & Macrumors