Apple has announced its long-awaited move into the digital textbook market, unveiling a new bookstore for its iPad tablets, a free publishing tool to help authors create interactive instructional materials and a new application for its "iTunes U" service for sharing university courses. At its first launch since the death of co-founder Steve Jobs last year, Apple emphasised the potential to accelerate the transformation of an industry that has already invested heavily in digital materials and its intention to work with publishers. Printed textbooks were "not the ideal modern teaching tool, yet the content is amazing," said Phil Schiller, Apple's head of marketing, as he hailed the potential of technology to improve students" results. Apple's latest effort to persuade content companies that it is an ally featured large publishers, including Pearson, which owns the Financial Times, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, as well as smaller groups such as the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, run by a Pulitzer prize-winning biologist. Publishers present at the event unveiled a limited number of digital textbooks, priced at $14.99 or less. Apple will take a 30 per cent cut of titles sold through its new iBooks 2 application, but Terry McGraw, chairman and chief executive of McGraw-Hill, said he was "very relaxed" about this and believed Apple could "supercharge" the industry's shift to digital. Apple is chasing a global school and college textbook market that publishing analysts at Outsell expect to reach $19.4bn in 2013. The digital share of that market will jump from 3.4 per cent in 2010 to 18.3 per cent next year, they forecast. "With nearly 1.4bn enrolled students and teachers worldwide, this represents a significant opportunity to manufacturers," Futuresource Consulting noted this week, projecting that PC shipments to the education market would rise from 11m units in 2011 to more than 40m units by 2016. Mr McGraw said his company was testing high school titles at a $14.99 pilot price, payable annually by authorities or students, and hoped to make better margins because, while print textbooks sell for $75-$80, they are only renewed every five or six years. Publishers would also benefit from not bearing traditional printing costs and from the potential to reach new consumer markets around the world, said Genevieve Shore, Pearson's chief information officer. Analysts said the announcement should accelerate the spread of digital learning tools but warned that their adoption could be held back by the cost of hardware such as Apple's iPad, which sells for $499 or more. Some schools can't pay for heat. They don't have money for iPads," one education executive said. Apple has long offered deals for the education market and courted school officials but made no mention of offering new discounts on its hardware. "This is not a textbook-killer," said Cathy Mickey, senior analyst at Simba Information, emphasising authorities" preference for professional content. I think this is going to turn out to be an important milestone [but] it is going to be a long process and a lot has to change in schools and among teachers before this is embraced. Vikram Savkar, publishing director at Nature, said Apple would increase its share of education spending but would not dominate the market as it does with music. Analysts and executives welcomed Apple's moves to make it easier for large and small publishers to create engaging, interactive digital texts featuring embedded video, rotating 3D graphics and tools for easy highlighting and note-taking. "Kids today have grown up with technology," said Bill Goodwyn, chief executive of Discovery Education, part of Discovery Communications. "When they go to schools and are asked to "power down" and put technology away, you're not engaging them and you're going to lose them." Analysts emphasised the continuing role for suites of services that marry content with other digital tools. David Worlock, a digital strategist and long-time analyst, said: "People are beginning to move away from just putting all the stuff in a textbook [online] with some bits of video to trying to structure a learning journey that people can take at different speeds, which can be assessed at every stage." Ms Shore noted that Pearson was also working with other device manufacturers, such as Amazon. "It is the combination of the content and the iPad that makes it incredibly engaging, but this is just one route to the student," she said. Apple's competition includes Kno tablets designed for etextbooks, online rental services such as Chegg and Course Smart, a publisher-backed hub that already offers 90 per cent of the most commonly recommended college textbooks in digital form for the iPad and Android tablets.