Apple's Education Event

The other day Apple sent out invites for an event late next week. Apple says the event will be focused on education, and take place in the Big Apple.

I think it’s a safe bet we’ll see an update to iBooks bringing digital textbooks to iOS. It’d be pretty awesome if you could rent books a semester at a time for a low price. I would have loved that when I was in college.

I have a couple other suspicions, but I don’t have a great deal of faith in seeing them come to fruition.

First, I wonder if we’ll see iBooks for Mac. I’ve personally never cared for reading a novel on my MacBook, but a textbook would be a different story. If you’re using your Mac to write a term paper, it would be handy to quickly reference your textbook via Command-Tab.

Second, this seems to be a good venue to introduce a revamped iWork for Mac. The current version is getting a little long in the tooth. I’d like to see the iWork suite take some design cues from the iOS apps for full-screen mode on Lion. Also, iCloud integration is sorely needed. I’m sure we’d all like to see how Apple will handle the UI for iCloud on the Mac. It’d also be nice to see more robust digital publishing tools integrated into Pages, making it easier for authors to create stuff for the iBookstore.

In the end, I think the main focus will be on textbooks. That said, I do have a feeling in my gut that says this event will have a much larger impact on the future than any of us are thinking.