Inkling Interactive Electronic Textbooks For iPad

Apple’s new iText and iBooks 2 are not the only e-textbook option on the iPad. San Francisco’s Inkling Systems, Inc., which entered the digital textbook market more than two years ago, offers Inkling, a free iPad app platform for interactive textbooks, built from the ground up for iPad. Inkling turns paper-based textbooks into interactive learning experiences while staying compatible with the print book for classroom use.

Inkling is a completely new way to learn. It includes:
* Shared Notes that make it easy to collaborate with friends in realtime
* Integrated interactive media in every textbook title, such as videos, 3-D objects, and guided tours
* A simple and powerful user interface that makes it easy to study
* Interactive quizzes that help you immediately gauge your level of understanding
* An intuitive search engine that predicts your search as you type

And while it’s entirely new, it also keeps the things you love about the print book:
* All the content of the print edition, and a lot more
* Page numbers you can jump to directly
* Digital media you’d otherwise get online with a “code,” integrated directly

Inkling’s developers note:

When we set out to design Inkling, we thought about the assumptions people make, usually unconsciously, each time they create or consume a book.

Take the concept of a page, for example. A page is a block of content divided by what “fits” into a given physical space. If you’ve ever done an essay for a course, you’ve probably changed the amount of content on a page by changing the line spacing or changing the font size. But the page itself rarely represents a semantic break in the content. That is, a page is a page not because it makes sense for the content itself, but because that’s just what happened to fit.

Enter iPad. There’s no such thing as a page. There’s a 1024 by 768 screen that can change in response to your fingers. There’s a display instead of ink. There’s memory instead of paper. There’s a world of new opportunities, and whole new set of constraints.

Guess what! The iPad isn’t a book.

Publishing in this new era will cast aside the constraints of the printed book and embrace the opportunity of multitouch devices and their impressive computing power. It will generate content that responds to the user, and it will engage people in new ways that television, newspapers, magazines and websites never could.

Inkling is the realization of that potential. It’s a flexible, interactive publishing platform where the human is at the center of the creative process, not the book. Where the iPad is the canvas, not paper. And as people start to grasp the power of the platform, you’re going to see ever more exciting content inside.

New in Version 2.1.1
• Various small improvements

System requirements:
• Compatible with iPad.Requires iOS 4.2 or later.

Free

iTunes Store:
http://bit.ly/cmrdS6

Inkling Inc. Website:
http://www.inkling.com/