McGraw-Hill Said to Have Second Pairing with Apple

PublishersLunch

You can expect the steady stream of speculation over Apple's "education announcement" on Thursday at the Guggenheim Museum in New York to continue unabated. The WSJ cites a person "familiar with the matter" who says that McGraw-Hill "has been working with Apple on its announcement since June." The paper notes that Cengage Learning, which has worked with Apple in the past, will attend Thursday's event, though we imagine most educational and textbook publishers will as well.

Ironically, the Journal doesn't seem to recall that McGraw-Hill was supposed to be one of the marquee launch partners when the iPad debuted in early 2010, until ceo Harold McGraw III leaked Apple's announcement and MH's participation on CNBC the day before the actual event. ("Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system so it will be transferable. So what you are going to be able to do now is we have a consortium of ebooks. And we have 95% of all our materials that are in ebook format on that one. So now with the tablet you're going to open up the higher education market, the professional market.") The company later denied that they were going to be part of the launch, and insisted McGraw's comments were "speculative."

Also remember that prior to the iPad launch, in October 2009, McGraw-Hill paired with ScrollMotion to make 600 titles available on the iOS (later expanded for iPad) and formed a partnership to develop electronic versions of books. In early 2010, McGraw-Hill group president of higher education Rik Kranenburg told the WSJ, "People have been talking about the impact of technology on education for 25 years. It feels like it is really going to happen in 2010."

Everyone is very confident that their unnamed sources have the real scoop. Ars Technica is receiving a lot of replay for their contention that sources say Apple will announce a software tool "that makes the process [of creating ebooks] as easy as creating a song in GarageBand."

Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis helpfully agrees (or wishes) "that's what we believe you're about to see." He adds, "Publishing something to ePub is very similar to publishing web content. Remember iWeb? That iWeb code didn't just get flushed down the toilet—I think you'll see some of [that code] repurposed." Expect more speculation to follow.

Meanwhile, as background, USA Today has a thorough piece on the many experiments and pilot projects underway trying to develop a proper market for textbooks on tablets--and why, despite interesting efforts from the likes of Inkling, Flat World Knowledge, Kno and others, students are unconvinced so far.