Apps, Computing 
No Comments iBooks 2-Life on Earth
I turned on my iDevices yesterday ad noticed that the red bad was lighted up instructing me to update my Apps. I hopped on my Wi-Fi, and looked to see what all the fuss was about and to my surprise there was an update for iBooks 2 featuring new interactive textbooks. Wish I had these when I was in school. After the update, I decided to have a look around and for some odd reason the first book I tried to find was an algebra book. Don’t know why I tried to find a book about algebra, was not my favorite topic in High School. Actually I did not mind algebra so much but had an awful teacher. On my way to browsing for algebra books I found a free preview textbook called Life on Earth, a biology book by E.O. Wilson. The pictures looked really cool and it included videos. Its free so I pressed the download button. It was sort of late and the book was ~ 980 MB… that would take an hour or so to download… so I paused the download and went off to sleep. I resumed download earlier this evening and its still downloading as I type so I can’t say I’ve experienced the book quite yet. Just incase you did not get the invite Apple is now in the business of interactive electronic textbooks. Can’t wait until the download is finished to check this out. The textbooks are about $15 to think how much $ I could have saved on textbooks in College… Mon $15 for a textbook? Granted you have to have an iDevice and Wi-Fi to download. An iPad which is what I would use to view these books is ~$540, then you have to have Wi-Fi access to download which means some sort of broadband connection. These books aren’t exactly 10 MB so they are going to take a while in some of the areas with “crappy broadband connections.” I hope that Apple release a cheaper iPad next Month or whenever the iPad 3 is coming out. It should not only be lighter in weight but lighter in price. If not to compete with the Kindle Fire at least to make the price point a little easier to swallow in these hard economic times. Perhaps the textbooks are a sign of more iPad 3 goodness???