So, Apple's big disruption of the entire educational publishing business turns out to be [drumroll]:

• iBooks2
• iBooks Author, and
• iTunes U courseware.

Yesterday, I was worried about what Apple were going to do. Not paranoid - Apple don't create content, which is what we consider our most valuable asset - but worried. Now, though? Not so much.

It's not that iBooks 2 isn't good. It is, certainly a big improvement on the original iBooks. They've introduced a raft of good features like video, slideshows, interactive diagrams, multiple-choice questions, note taking and flash cards. The interface is also a lot cleaner and generally more Apple-like. (Oddly, though, they've left the interface completely unchanged for old ebooks, which gives a strangely inconsistent feel to the app.) iBooks Author promises to make it a lot easier for Mac users to create enhanced ebooks. And iTunes U can now deliver whole courses and let teachers manage their classes.

Where the announcement missed the point for me, though, is in thinking that the hard part of 'digital textbooks' is the 'digital'. It's true that there are lots of issues and even problems around digitising textbooks, but there are also lots of existing good solutions. All Apple have really done here is add yet another channel that we need to consider and possibly engage with.

(And on that note, the people I really feel sorry for those at Inkling, who've spent 2 years building a really good, iPad-exclusive digital textbook platform and channel, only to have Apple come in and cut the ground from under them. How will they compete against the built-in iBooks store and Apple's marketing might?)

As educational publishers (and teachers) know, the hard part of digital textbooks is creating the content. What Apple have done is make it easier for the ordinary, non-publishing person to digitise their own content. This may have a huge impact on teachers' lives by letting them create much nicer course materials more easily (if they only have the time to do so). But it won't make much difference to publishers. iBooks Author is just another conversion tool, and one that we'll have to add to our workflows if we want to sell books through the iBookstore. I haven't managed to check out their terms and conditions myself yet, but I hear that they may have some problems that may discourage publishers from using this channel.

So what effect will this all have? My suspicion is that it will be of the most interest to the self-publisher. It will genuinely make it easier to create and distribute textbook-like materials and other enhanced ebooks. But it doesn't address the question of creating, validating and marketing that material - jobs that publishers tend to emphasise.

The question, as I see it, for educational publishers is thus still, "How do we take our content and best convert it for the maximum benefit to the maximum number of our potential customers?" What Apple have done is to bring the question to the forefront of more people's minds, and to give us yet another toolset for doing the conversion.

Does it revolutionise the business? No.

Does it increase the pressure towards digitisation? Absolutely.

For more discussion of this issue, Futurebook and Litopia organised a podcast last night, in which I was pleased to participate alongside Philip Jones of Futurebook, Alison Jones of Palgrave Macmillan, Huw Alexander of Sage, Martyn Daniels of Value Chain and author MJ Rose. Skype issues meant that I'm not in the end product much, but there's good information there.