“It’s moving steadily forward,” said Tim Bajarin, president at Creative Strategies Inc., a tech industry research firm. He predicts that it will take two to three more years for the digital textbook industry to reach critical mass, and that he believes Apple now has a head start. “In many ways, you have to look at this as an Apple evangelistic move. The textbook industry has been relatively slow.”

Solid assessment of the current state of digital books in the classroom sixteen months on from Apple's iBooks launch. It's a big shift, and it was always going to take a while for educators to adapt their thinking and processes to the new medium. In many ways I'm glad to see that people are taking the time to learn how to do it properly, rather than just shovelling old content into the new form. I've been really impressed by the way those people I've worked with on iBooks projects have been quick to grasp the potential, and have begun thinking about how to make it work best in their own contexts.