Apple’s iBooks 2 App Struggles Out of the Gate

Early reports suggest that Apple’s iBooks 2 application has been struggling to fix some technical bugs, drawing widespread criticism from users and reviewers. On the company’s App Store website, over 100 reviews give the new application one star – the lowest possible rating – mainly due to a bug that causes the screen to go grey and the app to freeze. Users who have experienced the bug report that they attempted to read and textbook on the application and were quickly met with a grey screen. When they tried to interact with the textbook, they were unable to turn the page or close out of the chapter. When they reopened the app, they were unable to access other books and once again saw nothing but a grey screen. The application could only work again by re-downloading iBooks 2.
While the bug may certainly be a minor and correctable one, it nevertheless reflects an early stumble for Apple in an area where the company cannot afford to fall. The iBooks 2 – along with the iBookstore and iBooks Author – is part of Apple’s broad attempt to revolutionize the education industry. As it announced at a much-heralded event this week in New York, the company aspires to fully embrace digital textbooks by entering into publishing agreements, building publishing software, and providing cheap, virtual books that can be uploaded onto any iPad device. The iBooks 2 application is the interactive iPad program upon which digital textbooks can be read.
Apple’s plan has many strengths: there is a growing digital textbook market, competition in the educational tech world is limited, and the company has already contracted with the three publishing firms that together control most of the elementary market – McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Apple also, of course, possesses tremendous resources and a powerful brand name. Yet despite all these positive indicators, early reviews of the company’s objectives have been highly mixed.
Critics note that Apple can only successfully sell digital textbooks to elementary schools by convincing districts to buy hundreds of expensive iPads and then “renewing” the books every year – a proposition that all but the wealthiest schools are unlikely to consider. Furthermore, the company may have even more trouble entering the high school and college textbook markets, where competition is more fierce from both a publishing and a digital retailing perspective. Ultimately, Apple has tied its education success to that of its iPad device. It’s a risky play to make.
So it’s impossible to tell what will happen with Apple’s endeavors in the digital textbook world. All we know at this point is that the company got off on the wrong foot with its iBooks 2 app. But there’s a long road ahead

 Source : http://www.thetechupdate.com/