At a private event today at the Guggenheim in NYC, Apple announced its latest venture into education – bringing heavy and constantly outdated textbooks out of the picture, and entering their bestselling iPad into classrooms.

Starting with iBooks 2, Apple revamped the old app into, claiming to “bring a new textbook experience for the iPad.” Apple demoed textbooks on the iPad which are highly interactive with 3D models, videos and manipulative elements. For example, vertically rotating a book reflows the layout to emphasize textual article versus a horizontal layout which puts emphasis to graphics and interaction.

The books will be available in the new Textbook section of the iBookstore and titles will cover grades 7-12 with current samples playing at a $15 pricepoint. Apple has also announced its partnership with leading textbook publishers Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which altogether provide 90% of the current textbooks available to high school students.

Also launched is a free Mac app called iBooks Author, which allows anyone to create books to be published in the newly created Textbooks section of the iBookstore.

Meanwhile, iTunesU got its own standalone application under the iOS ecosystem. This free app will let students directly access currently available iTunes U in one place. Apple expects iTunesU’s popularity to skyrocket further, which has already seen over 700 million downloads in the past.

via TheNextWeb