Hence Apple's keenness to get a head-start. The company's iBooks 2 application, which can be downloaded from its App Store, will allow users of its iPad tablet computer to buy a range of digital books (for now limited to high school texts) mostly priced at $14.99 or less. To ensure that there are plenty of titles on offer, Apple has struck deals with publishers that account for the vast majority of textbook sales, including Pearson (which, through its ownership of the Financial Times, also owns a stake in The Economist) and McGraw Hill.

Apple is betting that students and teachers will swiftly embrace digital texts, which are not only far cheaper than printed versions but have other advantages too. Books made of bits and bytes do not get dog-eared with use and can serve up things such as arresting videos and 3D images to make learning more fun. The firm's software also lets users append notes to e-textbooks and convert these notes into electronic study cards that can be used for revision.

All this will not be of much use without millions of iPad-toting students. Apple reckons that some 1.5m of its tablets are already in use in educational institutions, thanks in part to the 20,000 educational apps that are available on the App Store. (The firm is also planning to expand its iTunes University, which offers virtual study courses.) To grow sales in educational circles rapidly, Apple will probably slash the price of earlier iPad models when it unveils the next version of the device, which is expected to happen sometime in the next couple of months. But Apple's best hope of driving demand for iPads is to ensure that there is a plethora of educational content available for them. This is why the company has also launched iBooks Author, a piece of software that makes it easier and speedier to create all kinds of e-books, in particular digital textbooks.

Some sceptics argue that printed textbooks are likely to prove longer lived than technology enthusiasts think. These are, the argument goes, used in very different ways to novels and other books that have already been swept up in the digital revolution. To compare passages in a text, for instance, students often skip back and forth between them. And sometimes they need to have several books open at once. A study conducted last year by the National Association of College Stores found that three-quarters of the 665 students surveyed preferred a hard copy to a digital one. Teachers who have long worked with printed texts may also be wary of prescribing digital versions for their courses.

But such hurdles will almost certainly be overcome as technology improves and the economics of digital textbooks become even more compelling. Such textbooks are also likely to prove increasingly popular for other reasons, too, including the fact that they can make learning a more social experience by taking advantage of Facebook-type features. Pressure from students and educational institutions fed up paying hefty prices for printed textbooks has already been driving the adoption of digital textbooks. Xplana, a consultancy owned by MBS Direct, a firm that provides electronic retailing services for educational institutions, was already predicting before Apple's announcement that sales of digital texts would rise from 3% of the American textbook market last year to over a quarter of it by 2015 (see chart). What is more, some governments are already promoting the use of digital textbooks in classrooms. South Korea even has a plan to ditch paper texts altogether as part of an ambitious plan to create a digital scholastic network.

Such trends explain why publishers have decided to partner with Apple on iBooks 2. No doubt they are hoping that they can retain some influence over how the pricing of their products evolves. They are also betting that instead of selling a printed textbook at, say, $75 to a school which then recycles it over several years to a number of students, they can make roughly the same amount of money by selling the same book in digital format directly to students each year.



But at the same time as Apple is working with incumbents, it is also encouraging others to attack them. Much like the App Store democratised the creation of software and blogging platforms spawned new media companies, the iBooks Author software and Apple's online bookstore will open up educational publishing to new companies and to individual academics who want to create their own texts. This will lead to an explosion of new textbooks, many of which will compete with those of existing publishers.

Apple's announcement will almost certainly spark a flurry of activity amongst its tech rivals. Rob Reynolds, the head of MBS Direct's digital arm, reckons that the firm's announcement is likely to prompt a swift response from Amazon, which has been leading the way in e-book publishing with its Kindle e-readers and the Kindle Fire, a tablet computer. As it and other technology firms pile into the educational-publishing arena alongside Apple, Steve Jobs's prediction that the business is ripe for disruption is likely to be proven correct—and traditional publishers will probably be taught a very costly digital lesson.