Apple unveils digital textbooks app for iPad

Apple is taking aim at the textbook market. The California-based gadget-maker unveiled a free iBooks 2 application for the iPad that brings interactive textbooks to the popular tablet computer.

"Education is deep in Apple's DNA," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of marketing. "With iBooks 2 for iPad, students have a more dynamic, engaging and truly interactive way to read and learn."

He said the iPad is "rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world" and 1.5 million iPads are already being used in educational institutions.

At a press conference in New York, Schiller and other Apple executives showed off the interactive animations, diagrams, photos and videos available in the iBooks textbooks.

Apple said the electronic textbooks feature "fast, fluid navigation, easy highlighting and note-taking, searching and definitions, plus lesson reviews and study cards."

"The iBooks 2 app will let students learn about the solar system or the physics of a skyscraper with amazing new interactive textbooks that come to life with just a tap or swipe of the finger," it said.

Apple announced partnerships with publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson to produce digital high school textbooks.

Most of the high school textbooks in Apple's iBookstore will cost $14.99 or less, Apple said, far cheaper than the current prices for print textbooks.

Apple also unveiled a free tool called iBooks Author which allows Macintosh computer users to create their own iBooks textbooks and publish them to the iBookstore.

Amazon and others have been seeking to tap into the market for digital textbooks but Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said iBooks 2 and iBooks Author will "democratize the publication and distribution of content."

"We'll see an avalanche of new companies and new content for the education market - and many of the best innovations will come from these smaller companies, not the biggest publishers," she said.

According to Forrester, electronic textbooks currently account for only 2.8 percent of the $8 billion US textbook market.

Apple also announced a new iTunes U application for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch that helps teachers create courses and offers free educational content for students from dozens of universities, including Cambridge, Duke, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford.

"Never before have educators been able to offer their full courses in such an innovative way," said Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet software and services.

"The all-new iTunes U app enables students anywhere to tap into entire courses from the world's most prestigious universities," Cue added.

Web in 2011: 2.1 billion users and 555 million websites

In 2011 there were 2.1 billion internet users around the globe surfing an estimated 555 million websites - 300 million of which were created in 2011.

Asia’s massive internet population grew from 825.1 million internet users in June 2010 to 922.2 million in March 2011. Internet populations in Europe (476.2 million users), North America (271.1 million users), Latin America/Caribbean (215.9 million internet users), Africa (118.6 million internet users) and the Middle East (68.6 million users) saw comparatively modest growth.

Each internet user had on average just under 1.5 email accounts, amounting to a total of 3.146 billion accounts worldwide.

Out of all the email clients around, Microsoft Outlook was the most popular. Web-based mail client Hotmail picked up the award for the largest email service in the world with a total of 360 million users.

The average corporate user sent and received 112 emails a day. Despite having strong spam filters set in their email client, 19 percent of the emails delivered to their inbox were classified as unwanted spam.

Overall the rate of email spam appears to be decreasing. In 2011, 71 percent of the worldwide email traffic was spam, down from 89.1 percent in 2010. Only 0.39 percent of all email received in 2011 was malicious.

Few additional facts about the internet in 2011:
1) China had the highest number of internet users in 2011: 485 million.
2) 45% of the web’s population was under the age of 25 in 2011.
3) The most expensive domain name sold in 2011 was social.com. It sold for $2.6 million. The domain name DomainName.com tied with Dudu.com in second place, selling for a cool $1 million.
4) 200 million people signed up to Facebook, putting the total number of users at over 800 million.
5) There were more IM (instant messenger) accounts than social networking accounts (2.6 billion vs 2.4 billion).
6) The Apple iPhone 4 was the most popular camera on photo sharing website Flickr.

Web monitoring company Pingdom scoured the web and crunched its own numbers to come up with this unique snapshot of the web in 2011. The entire list of internet milestones can be found on the company’s Royal Pingdom blog.