ebooks

E-books are now selling more copies than hardbound, print books, and the average public library e-book collection has expanded by 55 percent in 2010 and 75 percent in 2011.

Amid the unveiled alongside the iPad Mini at an event on Tuesday, CEO Tim Cook also brought up Apple’s leading role in education, highlighting the fact that the older full-size iPad had already been adopted by 2,500 classrooms around the U.S. in the two and a half years since it was first introduced.

Sept. 30 - Oct. 6 is Banned Books Week and libraries from Maine to Oregon are celebrating the 30th anniversary of our freedom to read.

Jill Duffy of PCMag.com may have said it best: "Apple brings a spotlight with it everywhere it goes, and people pay attention to anything caught in its glow."

Rumors of the new and improved iBooks application began swirling weeks before Apple's anticipated announcement on Jan. 19, but perhaps no one was expecting the tidal wave of media coverage that proclaimed the company's venture into the textbook industry to be the Holy Grail of K12 learning. After all, iPads are hardly new, nor are their netbook predecessors or online learning material, for that matter.