In what will likely be completely unsurprising news to many, we’ve now heard from multiple sources that Apple’s as-yet-unannounced iPad mini event will have a strong focus on iBooks. Since an iPad mini would likely be squarely aimed at those who wish to partake of media on their tablets, that would make a lot of sense.
The event will, of course, be primarily devoted a new hardware device, which iMore first reported would be a thinner, cheaper version of Apple’s iPad. But the primary purpose of such a smaller tablet would be to act as a conduit for Apple’s content, namely iBooks publications and movies.
iBooks has been a success for Apple so far, but they’re not going to pull up now. If I was a betting man, I’d count on Apple also announcing iBooks 3, with expanded support for annotations and other tricks in order to keep apace with Amazon’s Kindle x-Ray feature and maybe even multi-mode support for audio and text-book syncing. Also look for an iBooks Author update that refines Apple’s authoring tool with support for the new mini and the iPhone 5’s new screen format.
An iBooks-heavy event seems very likely, but we haven’t yet heard if Apple has anything in store for the other major kind of media people will be using an iPad mini for: movies. But I would be completely unsurprised if there was a movie-centric announcement as well.
October 23 is just around the corner, and if you’re a publisher or book fan, it’s shaping up to be a good one.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.