Two biggest names in textbooks announce support for Inkling, the maker of highly visual electronic books on iPad

Perhaps the most interesting emerging educational eBook platform has now support of nearly all big players in US: McGraw-Hill and Pearson, as well as John Wiley & Sons, W.W. Norton, and Wolters Kluwer. Inkling now clames to have access to 95 percent of the content universe.

"The investment by Pearson and McGraw-Hill, announced on Wednesday, is a major step for Inkling, a company founded in 2009. Inkling sells interactive textbooks that incorporate audio, video and interactive quizzes."

"In all, Inkling expects to have nearly 100 textbook available by the fall."

"There are other companies building iPad textbooks, MacInnis acknowledged. Competitors include ScrollMotion, and educational tablet-maker Kno is reportedly shifting its efforts from hardware to software. But he argued that everyone else is basically adding limited features to a PDF of the textbook and that these e-books are basically developed by the publishers’ business divisions without much input from the original textbook creators. Inkling, on the other hand, wants to publish apps that feel like they were truly built for the iPad, which usually means working with the books’ authors to create new content.

`It only gets interesting when the content itself changes and begins to respond to your fingertips, MacInnis said."

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