Global Equities Research, a consulting firm that tracks iBooks sales, has gone pubic telling the world that since Apple updated their popular ePub reader, iBooks to now read textbooks, over 350,000 textbooks where downloaded within three days of being available. This is an amazing number since each book is $15/piece! Apple of course gets their 30% of that…so do the math – $5*350,000 = 1.75 million dollars. HOLY CRAP!

I checked out the Physics textbook and WOW! I liked Physics in high school, and I can see how much more I would have liked it had I had an iPad with this textbook. Not only is the content right there and easy to navigate, there is motion and interaction with the textbook. Bravo to the textbook companies for taking full advantage of the iPads technology to make this a sweet looking textbooks. Students will be proud!

Along with updating iBooks, Apple released the new iBooks Author. The authoring tool is meant to help textbook creators built and publish their textbooks, but clearly has other potential. For example that writing career I always wanted – now can be done with ease, and I still get 70% of my sale price