Apple has unveilved an author tool as well as a revamped iBooks platform aimed specifically at textbook publishers, authors, teachers and, of course, students.

According to TechCrunch Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are all involved from launch along with DK Publishing, which has four books launching today: Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life, Natural History Insects, Natural History Animals, and My First ABC.

My initial view is that this was a confused announcement, confusingly announced. Will academic writers, or teachers, really want to create their own textbooks? But even if they do, why would anyone buy them without knowing that they have been edited and fact-checked by an established publisher?

Sure, the iBook2 platform, if it enables publishers to create easily fully interactive textbooks could be a boon for the education market and for small to medium-sized publishers who might not otherwise be able to reproduce their books digitally well. That's an interesting development but hardly a game-changer.

The iBooks Author app could be brilliant, but I'm not seeing the immediate connection between it and the textbook announcement.

I'm also not buying the argument that this further writes publishers out of the picture. Having just interviewed Amanda Hocking, one of the points she made was that was more interested in writing her books than being the publisher: partly because of the huge amount of work it can take. And she was talking about straight text books.

Allowing more authors to self-publish and spend more time making their books look beautiful and interactive as well as readable will make the indie market more robust and more creative, but it seems to me that the more complex you make a digital book the more you are likely to need the help of a third party—possibly even a publisher.

And I've not even thought about the implications of the Apple lock-in, which appears designed to lock most sensible publishers out.

We'll be live on Litopia talking this through tonight from 8pm.