On Tuesday, after announcing its financial results, McGraw-Hill revealed in an interview with CNBC that Apple would indeed launch its tablet yesterday, with a textbook distribution agreement in the form of ebooks and even running the iPhone OS. Well, some of the information she said came true, with the exception of the most important:
AMcGraw-Hill was not highlighted by Apple at yesterday's event regarding the iBooks and iBookstore ads. In fact, she was the only textbook distributor scheduled to be announced at the event, but it was not. According to VentureBeat, there is a chance that the company was excluded from the agreement with Apple, but that should only be confirmed "in a few weeks".
Well, maybe McGraw-Hill has just been cut from the presentation. However, I don't think Apple's people were very satisfied with someone revealing an unknown product the day before the launch, even more so by a (former) partner company.
(via MacRumors)
Update
In an interview with Digital Daily, a McGraw-Hill representative claimed that the company did not comment on the CNBC aiming to reveal the iPad ahead of time, as it had no involvement with the gadget, contrary to what had been speculated a long time ago. The report by the company's CEO was made only to emphasize the possibility of the tablet running apps iPhone OS which would motivate institutions to adopt it and use McGraw-Hill solutions through it.
In addition, only content from non-educational publishers was put up for sale on the iBookstore, which goes against the real intentions of McGraw-Hill with the iPad, that is, to distribute complete mobile education solutions that go beyond books. This initiative could have been understood only considering the fact that the new product (at the time unknown) would run apps for iPhone, based on what several other old rumors pointed out.
In short, the didactic publisher's true intentions with the iPad should never be met by the iBookstore, so it is officially not part of the deal for the Apple eBook store at least for the moment. However, I am not the only one to believe that it took too long to disprove the comments that preceded the launch of the iPad.
