News Story

First Open University iBook now in Store

Peter Scott, Tuesday 27 Mar 2012

The first Open University interactive iBook title “Moon Rocks” was published into the Apple Book store last week (22 March). The Open University already has over 420 eBooks in our very popular iTunes U courses, but this iBook is the first to use Apple’s new interactive publishing system.

Today the book has been featured by Apple in the “new and notable” section of the UK iTunes book store and has been highlighted in a new iTunes U course release worldwide.

The Moon Rocks iBook was produced with Apple’s iBook Author software from an ePub created by Andy Tindle and and Simon Kelley from the OU Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space & Astronomical Research. The course “Moons: an introduction” which uses the new format book is also ‘featured’ in iTunes U today. Nice one!

‘Moon Rocks’ contains a number of highly interactive elements, including NASA images and movies, plus panoramas, quizzes, and elements from our celebrated ‘Virtual Microscope’. This release is the result of extensive work between the CEPSAR authors; the Learning and Teaching Solutions team; and our own new media folks in the Knowledge Media Institute.

Well done, all!