We're here at Apple's education-themed event at the Guggenheim museum in New York City, and the company's just introduced iBooks Author, a free OS X program for producing books including -- yes -- educational texts. The real story here is ease of use, with the ability to drag and drop photos, videos and even Microsoft Word files into various templates. If you use Apple's own suite of office apps, in particular, you can drag and drop a Keynote presentation into the doc, and it'll live on as an interactive widget. (You can whip up other widgets, too, though you'll need to know Javascript or HTML.) Moving beyond the main text, authors can also arrange glossaries by highlighting words, clicking and then clicking again to add a definition. In a surprise move, Apple also said authors can publish straight to the store, though we're waiting for clarification that textbook writers and other scribes are actually exempt from Cupertino's notorious App Store approval process. In any case, the app is available today, for free, in the App Store, so by all means, get cracking on that sci-fi glossary you never knew you wanted.
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