When Apple announced both the release of their iBooks 2 and upgrades to iTunes University, I was curious to see what kind of integration they had between the two. If you do a web search on the subject, you will find plenty of articles that tell you that iBooks textbooks “fully integrate with” iTunes U—but without providing any details. What does that mean?
From what I can tell, it means that you can put a deep link from iTunes U to a specific page in an iBook. That’s what “fully integrates” means. What it apparently doesn’t mean is the ability to insert iTunes U content directly into the book via an iFrame or some other means. Technically, speaking, it would have been easy for them to do this. The iBook format is essentially EPUB. It’s HTML, CSS, and Javascript. A collection of web pages. They even have explicit support for widgets. It wouldn’t have been hard at all for them to create an iTunes U widget. But they didn’t go there. I think that omission, while not a huge deal in and of itself, is deeply revealing about the limits of Apple’s vision about textbooks and education.