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You can’t help but feel apocalyptic when a tech giant targets the industry in which your company operates. Sometimes, the sky truly does fall on the smaller, creative players toiling away in emerging or transforming markets. This is especially the case when the tech giant in question is Apple. So I couldn’t help but be distracted before yesterday’s announcement. Equally, then, I couldn’t help but feel uplifted by what turns out to be – for Symtext at least – a “rising tide floats all boats” outcome.

Here’s what we know:

• Apple introduced three things: a new version of iBooks focused on textbooks; iBooks Author; a revamped iTunesU
• Between the three it is possible to create highly interactive and engaging educational content at, theoretically, a fraction of the cost and time, distribute it to a large and ready audience of Apple users, and organize and measure the content using the course management tools now offered in iTunesU.
• Apple’s play is purely digital. There are no hooks or dependencies into print-based business models.
• K-12 is the focus of Apple’s initiative, for now. (That parameter is unlikely to persist.)
• Textbooks will range in price from free to $14.99.
• There are 8 titles in the launch collection, contributed by Pearson, McGraw, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• Even for a big player like Apple there is a learning curve: Hackles are being raised by what appears to be a rather restrictive EULA. Who owns the output of iBooks Author?

Apple’s entry into educational publishing carries with it a number of implications. Without providing an exhaustive list, here’s my view on what’s important:

• The end is nigh for print based business models. Apple’s emergence in educational publishing with its authoring, distribution, and management tools, is going to force publishers to revamp their authoring, production and distribution processes around leaner, more flexible and updatable digital business and product models.
• The pace of change has just increased. Publishers must move faster to adopt digital only business models. Schools – including libraries, teaching and learning groups, and campus stores – should expect to see the impact of the digital learning materials business affect them more quickly. Estimates were that 2014 would see us reach a tipping point where sustaining print-first models would finally yield to digital. It might be time to advance our expectations to 2013.
• The competitive landscape has shifted seismically. Virtually every player in the EdTech ecosystem, spanning authoring, production, and distribution, is affected in some way. The sheer gravitational pull of Apple’s presence will bend certain companies out of all recognition, fling others into space, and create a Goldilocks zone for others. I have some strong opinions about the resiliency of startups, so how Inkling, Kno, and Flat World Knowledge respond is of great interest to me. Same for LMS players like Blackboard… the advent of iTunesU as a lightweight LMS is a fascinating development.
• Apple has proved to naysayers that education is an attractive market. Market estimates vary, but the Higher Ed learning materials market by itself is roughly a $10B market.  Large chunks of this market are now in play. And that’s just Higher Ed in North America. Include K-12, Corporate, and International learning materials markets, and you can clearly appreciate that this is a market worth fighting for.
• Like any new entrant, Apple is going to have to adapt to the environment. I am referring here to device neutrality, which from everything I have seen is a central tenet to learning materials delivery.  What do you do in a class of 100 students, if 50 of them don’t have an Apple device?

For Symtext, what wasn’t in yesterday’s announcement was an important as what was. We are focused on Educator Curated Learning Materials (ECLM). The thesis behind ECLM is to make it easier for every educator to bring to bear their own unique pedagogical perspective. To support this it is necessary for educators to be able to select – from multiple sources – chapters, cases, podcasts, videos, self-authored materials etc and mash that up into their own unique learning materials publication. Further, this material should be device neutral, social, and highly flexible. In this context, highly engineered content becomes less a determinant than whether or not the underlying material itself helps the educator teach the best possible course.

As a clear alternative to print based models, ECLM is the market that will most benefit from more competition and a greater pace of change. Why? As prices fall for pre-packaged digital texts, and more digital inventory becomes available from content creators, the value in ECLM’s bespoke model becomes more clear and obvious: if it’s easy and affordable to create completely custom learning materials – we call it a Liquid Textbook – more and more schools, educators, and publishers will support the model. And we know, from having done this for some time now, that rates of adoption stay high for Liquid Textbooks, term over term. Students see value in accessing their educator’s unique perspective – learning from his/her annotations, briefing notes etc. and participating in the debate, discussion and dialogue with classmates. ECLM is a growing market; Apple’s entry into the textbook portion of the market only hastens its arrival.

This is not to say that Apple’s announcement doesn’t affect us. It does. It creates more urgency to incorporate highly engineered content objects into our platform. It raises the bar of expectation over usability. But really what this does is signal the presence of a large market undergoing profound change. It shakes up the landscape to our benefit – with more urgency among publishers to adapt to new circumstances and, one supposes, an equal amount of urgency among schools to respond in kind.