Apple's iBook Initiative to Revolutionize Technology

The core focus of business is to address a problem. And the problem in education when it comes to the digital space isn’t a lack of content or publishing solutions; the problem is discovering quality. Education has enough content. There is more generic content out there for any individual subject than is possible to know. There are digitally proficient teachers who customize and repackage that content and those tools in ways that are appropriate for the students in their classes — from kindergartens and high schools into colleges and universities. Anyone in education knows there is a fast-growing community of teachers online doing their best to share the best tools, the best content and the best news ideas that they can. The problem is how we determine what is the best-quality content. Essentially, the problem is not access to educational content, but rather sifting through all the available content out there for the best quality products that you need. 


Apple is only adding to the problem by offering more tools to create and share content. In doing so, it will contribute to the feeling many have of being overwhelmed and overloaded with content, which they are struggling to sort through and are left to their own devices to sort, rate and organize. 


Apple relies heavily on the crowd to do this. But for many areas, the crowd is not enough.

Areas such as education and health that the whole population is interested in and has an investment in, but which they don’t all have an in-depth knowledge of, require more than just the crowd to make decisions about what constitutes the best-quality content and tools. Education is not the type of activity you want directed by a popularity contest.

But for Apple to continue to ignore the importance of helping parents and educators sort through and make sense of the tens of thousands of apps in the education section of the iTunes App Store is a missed opportunity to lead another revolution.