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Apple’s Philip Schiller discusses iBooks 2 for iPad at a launch for the company’s new textbook initiative in New York on Thursday. Apple also released iBooks Author, a tool meant to lure publishers into creating new content specifically for the iPad.

Apple Inc. on Thursday launched its attempt to make the iPad a replacement for a satchel full of textbooks by starting to sell electronic versions of a handful of standard high-school books.

The electronic textbooks, which include Biology and Environmental Science from Pearson and Algebra 1 and Chemistry from McGraw-Hill, contain videos and other interactive elements.

But it’s far from clear that even a company with Apple’s clout will be able to reform the primary and high-school textbook market. The printed books are bought by schools, not students, and are reused year after year, which isn’t possible with the electronic versions. New books are subject to lengthy state approval processes.

Apple staged the launch in New York City, home to the publishing industry. Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, unveiled the books at an event at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

Publishers have been talking about digitizing cumbersome textbooks for years, but Apple says the iPad has changed the equation. The company says there are already 1.5 million iPads in educational settings, making the tablet the ideal springboard for getting rid of paper.

“The iPad … is imminently portable. It’s a lot more durable than paper and binding. Of course it’s interactive,” Schiller said.

Apple’s iBooks will be able to display books with videos and other interactive features, the company announced Thursday.

A Slow Adoption Of E-Textbooks

Major textbook publishers have been making electronic versions of their products for years, but until recently, there hasn’t been any hardware suitable to display them. PCs are too expensive and cumbersome to be good e-book machines for students. Dedicated e-book readers like the Kindle have small screens and can’t display color.

The iPad and other tablet computers work well, but iPads cost at least $499. Apple didn’t reveal any new program to defray the cost of getting the tablet computers into the hands of students.

All this means that textbooks have lagged the general adoption of e-books, even when counting college-level works that students buy themselves. Forrester Research said e-books accounted for only 2.8 percent of the $8 billion U.S. textbook market in 2010.

On Thursday, Apple also released iBooks Author, a new tool meant to lure publishers into creating new content specifically for the iPad education user. At the unveiling, Apple’s Roger Rosner showed off technology that makes it easier to include animation and high-tech features into textbooks, and then publish them instantly.

The publishing tool is available for free, and the books that result from this effort will be available in a new iBooks store. The company also announced upgrades to iTunes U, which already holds thousands of college lectures.

The Digital Divide Issue

The publishing initiative may create a painful dilemma for school districts and colleges. Albert Greco, a professor of marketing at Fordham University in New York and a former high-school principal, said schools would need to buy iPads for its students if it were to replace printed books.

It wouldn’t work to let students who can afford to buy their own iPads use them in class with textbooks they buy themselves, alongside poorer students with printed books.

“The digital divide issue could be very embarrassing. Because if you don’t have the iPad, you can’t do the quiz, you don’t get instant feedback … that is an invitation for a lawsuit,” Greco said. “I would be shocked if any principal or superintendent would let that system go forward.”

Greco said hardback high-school textbooks cost an average of about $105, and a freshman might need five of them. However, they last for five years.

That means that even if an iPad were to last for five years in the hands of students, the e-books plus the iPad would cost more than the hardback textbooks.

Apple Can ‘Educate The Market’

A lot of companies already offer some of the features Apple is rolling out. Greco called the new app “a shot across the bow” of Blackboard Inc., a privately held company that provides similar electronic tools to teachers. It, too, has applications for cellphones and tablets.

But Osman Rashid, founder of a startup called Kno, says despite Apple’s heft, the new initiative will help his business by making e-textbooks more common.

“So we as a startup don’t have to spend as many marketing dollars trying to educate the market,” Rashid says. “We can now spend our funds telling people why Kno is the best place to go.”

According to Walter Isaacson, the biographer of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, reforming the textbook market was a pet project of Jobs, even in the last year of his life. At a dinner in early 2011, Jobs told News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch that paper textbooks could be made obsolete by the iPad. Jobs wanted to circumvent the state certification process for textbook sales by having Apple release textbooks for free on the tablet computer.

NPR’s Larry Abramson contributed to this report, which contains material from The Associated Press.

What is it?

This week, we’re going retro to the golden days of arcade gaming via the latest gadget superhit: the iPad. For those who lived through their teens in the 1980s and 1990s, and those who want to know how it was like before the advent of 3D gaming, it’s time to get nostalgic with the iCade iPad Arcade Cabinet.

What’s special about it?

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Story By: by Michaelangelo Matos

Group Inerane’s “Tamidit In Aicha” is raw and scrawny-sounding, but it also pulses with life and good cheer.

Song: “Tamidit In Aicha”

Artist: Group Inerane

CD: Guitars From Agadez, Vol. 3

Genre: World

Group Inerane is a guitar-rock band from Niger’s Tuareg area that’s part of a late-breaking wave of acts from along the Sahara that have been filed, in the main, as “desert blues.” It’s true that Inerane’s music often earns that appellation, at least on musical terms; blues and traditional music figure heavily into its catalog on the Seattle raw-internationalist label Sublime Frequencies. But the fetching “Tamidit In Aicha” has little in common with the rough power of an Etran Finatawa, or the bristling edges and casual hugeness of a Tinariwen.

“Tamidit In Aicha” is slighter and sweeter: Think of it as a kind of jangle-pop tune. The guitar sways lightly, while the drums are busy but remain in thrall to a straight-ahead beat. It’s raw and scrawny-sounding — the album was recorded live, and you can tell — but it’s also pulsing with life and good cheer, like the best moments on a U.S. college station back when bedroom-label seven-inch singles were experiencing a surge. “Tamidit In Aicha” is the kind of record you might hear slotted between the Vulgar Boatmen and early Built to Spill, had it come the right DJ’s way.

Story By: by Egon

Gimme Gimme Records in Manhattan’s East Village, Egon’s source for an affordable copy of Charles ‘Cha Cha’ Shaw’s Kingdom Come.

The recession has wreaked havoc on serious record collectors and the dealers who service them, from those who invested a precious fortune in major-label, early-’90s rap 12″s to those who thought there would always be a market for European sound library albums. Sure, changing trends have something to do with this depreciation — I have boxes of off-brand “deep funk” 45s that I can’t unload for anywhere close to what I paid for them a decade ago — but I’ve found the answer is largely this: neither tight-pocketed nor high rolling collectors are willing to fork out a dime for anything but what the uncouth call “investment grade” wax.

Thus, you’re still going to shell out $700+ for a first-press mono issue of The Beatle‘s iconic Revolver on Parlophone (you know, the one with the alternate mix of “Tomorrow Never Knows”?). But the next time you stumble upon a copy of Edgar Broughton Band’s amazing yet cultish Wasa Wasa with a slightly stained cover, you’ll probably find it offered for a price not seen since 1995.

This changing market is a shame for those with means, as many of the vinyl-emporiums that used to stock top-shelf pieces shuttered as the floor fell out. But, for the savvy collector looking for great, obscure listens, this is the time for bottom-of-the-barrel to mid-grade purchases. The records are out there, and they’re plentiful — a thesis I planned to prove on a recent trip to New York.

I’d been afforded a precious few hours to peruse the bins in what remains of my usual haunts — the dozen or so stores that dot Manhattan’s East Village — and I’d made up my mind that I would buy five records for this column for less than $100. Total. There would be no display case purchases. There would be none of that, “Do you have any rare stuff behind the counter?” banter. No, I’d be forced to revisit those mid-’90s days when, as a broke college student, I’d spend the two hours between leaving my summer internship and catching the 9:07 train to New Haven trying to find a $20 bargain.

My first stop was the back room of Academy LPs, where I perused some of the Folkways albums that had found their way from Miles Davis producer Teo Macero’s collection, through the New York Public Library, into Academy’s stacks. With provenance like that, I knew I wouldn’t find any cheapies. So, after some choice listening, I walked out into the brisk air and headed east.

What is it?

This week, we’re going retro to the golden days of arcade gaming via the latest gadget superhit: the iPad. For those who lived through their teens in the 1980s and 1990s, and those who want to know how it was like before the advent of 3D gaming, it’s time to get nostalgic with the iCade iPad Arcade Cabinet.

What’s special about it?

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Story By: by Betto Arcos

Javier Sicilia speaks at a rally in Los Angeles.

Astrid Hadad performs in Mexico.

Downs’ whole album was inspired by her feelings about what’s happening in Mexico today.

“We’re going through a very violent period where it’s inevitable, you’re always seeing these things on the news that are very sad and depressing,” she says, “and you wish that you could do something about it. And I think, as an artist and as a human being, you’re sensitive to what is happening.”

Writer and performer Ruben Martinez is a professor of literature and writing at Loyola Marymount University, as well as the producer of a performance in Los Angeles about the drug war. He says that, in terms of artistic resistance to the drug war, the importance of Javier Sicilia cannot be understated.

“As a writer, the only tools I have are language and representation to render a portrait of what is happening today. And Javier Sicilia was the first voice, artistically I think, to approach this,” Martinez says. “[His final poem] moved a whole nation, and now it’s moved us on this side of the border too, because ultimately, the war is on both sides.”

Martinez says that we may not see mutilated bodies hanging from bridges in this country, but that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 22,000 people die every year in the U.S. as a result of drug overdoses.

“That number of deaths should be added to the number of deaths every year in Mexico,” Martinez says. “It’s all part of the same conflict.”

Singer and performance artist Astrid Hadad has addressed the current situation in Mexico from a different perspective. Hadad sees the roots of the current violence in a number of problems facing Mexico. She names a few of them in the song “Tierra Misteriosa” (Mysterious Land):

Poor motherland, over you fly vultures
Army men, transnational corporations, presidents, hit men, businessmen
Yesterday they were called viceroys, today they’re dignitaries
Five hundred years have passed, only the names have changed
Now the pillagers are called politicians

“And if that’s not saying something against what’s happening today, I don’t know what is,” Hadad says. “All of us who are fighting say that only a good education and the redistribution of wealth, called justice, will solve this. Otherwise, the current violence will never end.”

But Downs offers some hope. In her song “Paloma del Comalito,” she cites a popular Mexican expression: No hay mal que dure cien años — “No evil can last a hundred years.” Her hope is that it won’t take that long.

Dubai: Journalist and filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has become the first Pakistani director to be nominated for the prestigious Academy Award.

Saving Face, Obaid-Chinoy’s portrayal of Pakistani victims of acid attacks, was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Documentary: Short Subject category.

The film follows a British-Pakistani surgeon as he travels to rural Pakistan to treat survivors of acid violence. "Saving Face is also a story of hope and about Pakistani women helping each other," Obaid-Chinoy told the Wall Street Journal late last year.

"It hasn’t sunk in yet but I’m going 2 the #Oscars with #SavingFace 4 best doc short- proud moment 4 me & my team & I hope 4 #Pakistan," Obaid-Chinoy tweeted upon receiving the news.

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By Bob Boilen

Anna Calvi is a brilliant guitar player, and if it stopped there, I’d still be captivated by her music. But Calvi’s playing is only the underpinning of the superb songs she writes and sings — and that’s saying nothing of her incredible voice.

Calvi’s music has roots in the 1950s, but that’s a bit misleading. Nostalgia isn’t a driving force in her work; but it’s more like the spare sound you might hear in the guitar twang of Duane Eddy. It’s the passion of Elvis Presley or Edith Piaf that feeds this music. And yet Calvi, who is British and born in 1982, infuses her songs with something new.

The slow build that takes place in just three short songs performed at the NPR Music offices — from a guitar instrumental to the final primal cry of “Jezebel” — is nothing short of astonishing. It’s as succinct a glimpse into the arc and soul of an artist as I’ve seen at a Tiny Desk performance.

Calvi’s self-titled debut was nominated for the Mercury Prize last year, and I would have been glad to see it win. If you don’t know anything about her, this spare but powerful performance provides a perfect introduction.

Producer and Editor: Bob Boilen; Videographer: Michael Katzif; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; photo by Cristina Fletes/NPR