In four months, the Apple iPad has altered the world of publishing. The device has become home to books embedded with video clips, children's titles armed with physics software, art books containing holographic images, and interactive magazines so dynamic, they rival the Web. The launch of digital textbooks this week takes it another step further, allowing students to share notes with fellow students and teachers. Here are six of the most compelling uses of the iPad "book."

Enhanced Edition Books
The iPad can accept eBooks from a number of different sources, including Amazon and Kobo. But it's within Apple's own iBooks store that you'll find the first books enhanced with audio and video clips. Initially, these books look no different from others until you come upon a page with what looks like a little YouTube window embedded within it. The idea is to incorporate these clips in the same way as pictures and illustrations would appear in paperback books. Click on the window to watch, or simply turn the page and move on.

hile it might be inappropriate for fiction, where the mind's eye provides the best images, for non-fiction titles such as biographies or historical accounts, this has the opportunity to add to a greater sense of insight into the subject.

Art Books
The first book to illicit "oohs" and "aahs" on the iPad was Theodore Gray's The Elements, a digital version of his popular art book on the periodic table. The iPad edition provides a living exhibit of the building blocks of life, with each section housing 3D holographic renditions of the objects contained. You can touch them, spin them, and access updated information through Wolfram Alpha. Art Books often focus on collections, a perfect theme for the iPad, which can make such lists areeasily browsed and searched. Phaidon's Design Classics, for example, explores the top 1,000 examples of industrial design in this way, allowing you to flick through each entry, or organize them by keyword.

Children's Books
A large, colourtouch screen is a natural fit for children's books, and you'll find no better example than the iPad edition of the Dr. Seuss classics. With The Cat In The Hat, kids can read along by built-in narration, by themselves, or in a special movie mode that pans and zooms to emphasize each word as it is spoken. The result is a hands-on experience that is very visual, and one that has proven very popular.

More technically-advanced is the iPad version of Alice In Wonderland by Atomic Antelope. John Tenniel's classic Illustrations within the Lewis Carroll story have been transformed with physics-based animation. Tilt the iPad, and the White Rabbit's pocket watch swings on its chain, Alice changes her height, and jam jars and candy pellets slide around the screen loosely, as if they were objects in the real world. A recent update to the book allows parents to choose a shorter "bedtime" version that lets them complete the tale in time for their little ones to drift off to slumber.

Magazines
For some print magazines, including Popular Science and Wired, the iPad is a chance to show how the editorial flow of the format can change the way we think about interactive content. Articles are displayed in stacks instead of spreads, images are replaced with 3D objects, and interactive journeys allow you to follow up the articles with explorations into related music, video, and slideshow demonstrations.

For other app creators,it's the magazine format that can be used to give new life to content from the Web. Cooliris' Discover app delivers Wikipedia entries with all the flow and visual presence of a magazine, allowing you to flip through pages that wrap around eye-catching imagery. Flipboard does the same for the Web as a whole, scraping the first paragraphs and images from articles across leading blogs and Websites. Users customize the content though divided tiles, devoting each section to a specific theme, such as technology, art, or entertainment. It also includes feeds from both Twitter and Facebook, publishing updates as if they were literary quotes, and album photos as if they were illustrations.

Guided View Comics
Iron Man, Batman, and Scott Pilgrim have all been given new life on the iPad where Comixology's display software presents them faithfully, but with the colour vibrancy of a backlit screen. Apps for Marvel, DC, and independent titles, deliver push-notifications when new issues arrive. Fans can read them with Guided View, a mode that pans and transitions among panels in a cinematic flow that matches the artist's intent. Pricing is $0.99 and up. When you add a weekly supply of free issues and a backstock of classics all in "mint" condition, it's easy to become a collector all over again.

Interactive Textbooks
Textbooks are expensive, which is why Inkling's decision to follow the iTunes Music business model is an inspired choice. Students can purchase a book outright at full price, or buy individual chapters at $2.99 each. Since many courses tend to use only a selection of chapters for study, this allows students to cut down considerably on expenses.

The books themselves are digital editions of existing print texts, but with all the advantages introduced in digital publishing: touch navigation, font adjustment, bookmarking, note-taking, keyword search, free samples, embedded videos, and 3D animations.

Where Inkling leads the pack is with a supported learning network. Users can create a profile that connects their textbooks with the copies owned by others, allowing students to share notes in the margin, and segments highlighted for importance. Students can even use the system to follow their teachers who themselves can update the texts with added notes; perhaps responding to discussions and questions from the classroom, for example.

At the moment, only one publisher, McGraw-Hill, has partnered with Inkling, offering the company's four biggest sellers through the application. But the enthusiastic reaction to the app has drawn enough attention that it will quickly populate with more titles soon.

For the first time, a revised textbook can actually be described as "gorgeous," and the interactive features make studying so attractive, publishers are bound to inspire parents to want to hit the books again themselves.

Article Tags:  books, students, interactive, allowing, themselves, first, images, digital, titles, popular, classics, notes, edition, content, publishing, version, example, articles, embedded, video, inkling, screen, children, illustrations, clips, objects, update, alic