[kjk]

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/0...om-publishers/

Two major publishers are trying a new tactic. They have invested in Inkling, a company that makes interactive textbooks available on the iPad. They have also agreed to make dozens of their titles available on Inkling’s service.

The investment by Pearson and McGraw-Hill, announced on Wednesday, is a major step for Inkling, a company founded in 2009. Inkling sells interactive textbooks that incorporate audio, video and interactive quizzes.

More here:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/...-breakthrough/

Inkling's app, which for now works only on the iPad, is the college textbook you wish you had in college. It's all digital but is more than a copy of a textbook page slapped onto a flat screen. The pages of the book scroll in a way that is optimized for a tablet, yet a feature allows the student to "jump to" a specific page number if, say, the professor says to do so. Interactive elements are seamlessly woven into the educational experience. In the venerable "Music: An Appreciation" by Roger Kamien, for example, a section on Beethoven allows the reader to listen to a symphony without leaving the text. While studying a graphic of the eyeball in Chapter 12 (on vision) in "Ganong's Review of Medical Physiology," a standard for medical students, the Inkling app allows the reader to use iPad's multi-touch functions to zoom in and see every last capillary.