It's hard to overstate how important I think this is. There are a few reasons.
First, this brings a focused, clear path for educational content on the iPad. By opening the Books marketplace to more rich multimedia applications, Apple has made it possible for many of the dreams of interactive learning advocates to go mainstream. Imagine learning math by interacting with functions directly or doing symbolic manipulation directly. Or learning to code by actually doing it alongside a narrative. It's hard to imagine an area of study that would not benefit from creative use of technology in teaching it. (No, just adding videos and audio is not enough.)
Second, it opens the door to getting iPads in every classroom. By making it so there is a clear incentive for schools to buy iPads for all their students (cheaper, more useful textbooks) you get an iPad in the hands of every child. It goes without saying this is a big deal.
Finally, it opens the door for real competition for textbooks. By capping the price of textbooks at $15.00, students can easily decide to have several different treatments of the same topic on their iPad. If you manage to create content that is more clear, enjoyable, or even correct, parents and students will be one tap away from getting access to it, cheaply, if their officially-sanctioned book is not doing the job. This turns traditional textbook publishing on its head, because it empowers parents to overturn the textbook choices their school makes from the bottom up. If the entire math class has switched over to using an alternative textbook to learn a topic (just through word of mouth), this might tip the scales so the best content ends up being adopted by schools. Creative, upcoming authors will find that usurping the mainstream textbooks is now possible. I can imagine maverick publishers basically taking the same table of contents from a mainstream textbook and modernizing the treatment of the topic, so students have an easy way to move forward in their class at the same pace but with a much better learning tool.
And this is just what is on the top of my head, before forward thinking content creators have gotten their hands on this new platform.
I agree with everything you said but worry about the market dynamics of capping the price at $15. As far as I've seen, Apple has never done this before (putting a price floor of $0.99 for paid apps is quite different).
Will this result in each "chapter" being $15 eventually? Will this favor the rich student over the poor one in terms of coverage (underfunded school wants basic book that covers entire course, but marketplace offers much better books that are more surgical in coverage - rich kid gets better content while poor kid does not).
Hmm but since private schools already exist, a more granular way for families to improve their child's education by choosing to spend more money on it is surely only going to be an improvement. (no idea why you were down voted)
Technically, they did cap prices after the "I am rich" app.
Back to the subject: I expect prices will rise to whatever the market accepts.
On the one hand, that may be less than what it currently accepts, because a) people expect lower prices for non-physical goods and b) there may be more competition.
On the other hand, production prices for 'books' might increase by orders of magnitude if publishers insert lots of interactive stuff (but I guess many textbooks already ship with CDs or URLs, so that effect may not be that large)
Apple never actually capped textbooks at $14.99 (from my understanding). What they've done is launch with all the textbooks at $14.99 or less. They're setting a precedent and I'm sure they're hoping it pressures all textbooks to follow suit, but nowhere did I read anything about Apple requiring all future textbook offerings to follow the launch pricing.
This is the reason to be interested in such matters, but I fail to see much of interest in this initiative from the strict perspective of textbook quality. (I will admit, however, that I am alien to the current e-textbook market and technologies.)
While fancy galleries, embedded videos and the such are quite nice, I would dare to suppose that they are not exactly novelties in the ebook field.
I might be austere, but Apple-style animations seem toyish, distracting and out-of-place. "Dynamically updated data" seems to be only pushable to Dashcode HTML widgets, which might be lacking in flexibility (but I might be wrong). There does not seem to be a framework for mathematical interactions that could aid comprehension, for example, nor one for on-the-fly manipulation of text structure that allows the student to fold blocks/etc., e.g. to focus on a particular paragraph/conceptual element.
Briefly stated: is Apple's "reinvention" merely reduced to a basic authoring tool and a branded store, which can tangentially (but importantly) channel external efforts in the sector?
I think it is a big change that students need to buy their books. Right now, schools frequently buy books and then keep them for years upon years, just renting them out to students. This change will increase textbook competition, and increase the rate of change of material.
It also means that generating different versions of text books (Texas vs. rest of the US) might make a lot more sense.
Given this answer (and the amount of downvoting on my previous statement), I think that I might have been ambiguous and left too much space for misunderstandings.
What I am challenging is not the overall value of the initiative (through market effects such as competition), but its technological side: given our parent post's first paragraph, what is Apple's contribution to the current e-textbook toolset? Digital textbooks offer much potential for improving certain kinds of cognitive tasks in both sciences and humanities — the former being exemplified by gfodor. However, from this standpoint, I do not see a significant step forward; rather, I see the promulgation of what are mostly "vanity" features that offer limited additional value for study and learning over traditional tools, and which are often styled with a certain kind of eyecandy that I personally find distracting and detrimental in productive contexts.
First, this brings a focused, clear path for educational content on the iPad. By opening the Books marketplace to more rich multimedia applications, Apple has made it possible for many of the dreams of interactive learning advocates to go mainstream. Imagine learning math by interacting with functions directly or doing symbolic manipulation directly. Or learning to code by actually doing it alongside a narrative. It's hard to imagine an area of study that would not benefit from creative use of technology in teaching it. (No, just adding videos and audio is not enough.)
Second, it opens the door to getting iPads in every classroom. By making it so there is a clear incentive for schools to buy iPads for all their students (cheaper, more useful textbooks) you get an iPad in the hands of every child. It goes without saying this is a big deal.
Finally, it opens the door for real competition for textbooks. By capping the price of textbooks at $15.00, students can easily decide to have several different treatments of the same topic on their iPad. If you manage to create content that is more clear, enjoyable, or even correct, parents and students will be one tap away from getting access to it, cheaply, if their officially-sanctioned book is not doing the job. This turns traditional textbook publishing on its head, because it empowers parents to overturn the textbook choices their school makes from the bottom up. If the entire math class has switched over to using an alternative textbook to learn a topic (just through word of mouth), this might tip the scales so the best content ends up being adopted by schools. Creative, upcoming authors will find that usurping the mainstream textbooks is now possible. I can imagine maverick publishers basically taking the same table of contents from a mainstream textbook and modernizing the treatment of the topic, so students have an easy way to move forward in their class at the same pace but with a much better learning tool.
And this is just what is on the top of my head, before forward thinking content creators have gotten their hands on this new platform.