Apple announced a good new additional service to deliver education content to the iPad. Previously, to get a self-published ePub book into iBook app on your iPad, one had to go through a relatively unpleasant set of manual steps to download and add your ePub to the iBook. With this feature added to the iTunes store publishing educational material directly to the iPad just got alot easier for the iTunes U schools.
“Dear iTunes U Administrator,
We are excited to announce support for ePub in iTunes U Public Site Manager. You can now easily distribute ePub files for viewing with the iBooks app on iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
ePub is an open ebook standard produced by the International Digital Publishing Forum which includes enhanced features like the ability to embed pictures, audio and video. In the iBooks app, users will be able to interact with your documents by changing the text size, font, and orientation, taking notes, creating bookmarks and looking up words in the built-in dictionary or Wikipedia.”