Today was another big day for Apple, as they held an education announcement at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City to announce Textbooks for iPad. Apple will not completely turn the industry upside down (not yet anyway), but they will provide students with a modern, interactive approach to learning through digital textbooks.

Students will be able to highlight text, takes notes, create note cards and use multitouch gestures to interact with their textbooks. McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin and Pearson have all signed up to offer textbooks at $14.99 or less for high-school level editions with more to follow.

Apple has also introduced iBooks Author, which allows users to easily build and publish digital books for Apple’s iBooks store, much like Apple’s iWorks apps. No official word if they will be called iTextbooks just yet – anyone wishing they could go back to school and learn on these new textbooks?..

To go along with their textbook announcement, Apple also unveiled a new version of its iTunes U product, which brings an iBooks interface to iTunes U. So far, iTunes U has primarily been used for lectures, but it can be used to manage curriculums, give assignments and stream live content. iTunes U is available for download in the App Store today.

Apple also filed a patent with the USPTO which could reveal next generation battery designs which are composed of a set of electrode sheets, enabling much thinner batteries due to a variety of design possibilities.

Finally, the iPad 3 rumors are heating up, as images found in the latest iBooks  app show a high-def iPad display sporting a quad-core Apple A6 processor, 4G LTE support and twice the battery life of an iPad 2.

Time will tell, but looks like quite a busy year for Cupertino in 2012. Oh yeah, have we mentioned we haven’t even gotten to the iPhone yet?

The New Age Textbooks Are Here