Will Kujawa, a student at Oklahoma State:

In a few years Apple could dominate the [college] classroom similar to how Microsoft dominates enterprise.

Will also talks about how the majority of Apple products in his college classrooms are MacBooks, not iPads. That makes sense because for a student who needs a computer to take notes, do research, and complete papers and other projects, an iPad is not a replacement for a laptop or desktop computer.

A computer has been the standard college-student gadget for decades. It used to be desktops, now it’s laptops, and Apple wants it to become iPads.

Apple wants the iPad to be seen as a computer replacement. And so I can’t help but wonder if positioning the iPad as a replacement for textbooks is also a subtle way to slowly introduce iPads as replacements for laptops.

It’s like a twist to the Halo Effect — instead of an iPod leading to a MacBook purchase, buying an iPad for casual usage leads to keeping the iPad for more serious usage. It’s already happening in the professional sphere (examples: I, II, III).

As Stephen Hackett said, last week’s announcements had Steve Jobs’ fingerprints all over them.

WordPress.com now has a dashboard RSS reader, with the ability to Like, Follow, and Reblog posts.

(Via Jonathan Christopher.)

Fraser Speirs gives a good overview of the good and bad regarding the new iBooks textbooks, iBooks Author, and iTunes U:

Apple already revolutionized education when it invented the iPad. While iBooks textbooks are a bridge from the past to the future—and we do need a way to get to the future—they are not that future. If Henry Ford had been an educational publisher, his customers would have asked for electronic textbooks instead of faster horses.

Michael E. Cohen:

Having access to good instructional resources is always better for students and for teachers than not having such access. And although interactive multimedia textbooks of the type that iBooks Author makes so very easy to prepare and to publish probably won’t make a bad teacher into a good one or a poor student into a candidate for valedictorian, it is much better to have them available for teachers and for students than not.

Do not buy this game if you value your free time.

On this week’s of The B&B Podcast, Ben and I talk about meetings, snow in Seattle, Harry Potter jellybeans, and iBooks.

Brought to you by, Verses, who is doing a giveaway. Details in the show notes.

Matt Gemmell gives a high-level look at what you’re getting into if you decide to publish a work via the iBooks Author app.

I’ve spent a the majority of my afternoon working in iBooks Author, and it is very simple to use. If you are wanting to ship a book that does not require this deep functionality then it would not be too much more work to release your book as an eBook, a PDF, and an iBooks book (or whatever the proper term is for a work that’s been built within iBooks Author).

Apple’s official page for textbooks on the iPad, iTunes U, and iBooks Author. Also this morning’s keynote has posted.

Something I wrote almost exactly a year ago. It goes hand in hand with the piece I wrote yesterday.

The iBooks Author app is now available via the Mac App Store.

My thanks to Scrivener for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

Writing a book or research paper is about more than hammering away at the keys until it’s done. Research, shuffling index cards to find that elusive structure — most software is only fired up after much of the hard work is completed.

Enter Scrivener, a content-generation tool that lets you compose and structure long and difficult documents based on material from multiple sources. Adopted by novelists, screenwriters, journalists, lawyers and academics alike, the program allows users to split the editor and view documents, PDF files, multimedia and other research materials next to each other. A virtual corkboard and outliner help with structuring or providing an overview of the draft. Collate, read and edit related text without affecting its place in the whole using Scrivener’s Collections feature. Close out the world in Full Screen mode. And when you’re finished, export to e-readers or the most popular word processing programs for submission.

Available for Mac OS X and Windows at Literature and Latte.