Apple senior vice president and Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer today announced on Apple’s first fiscal quarter earnings call that the company has seen 3 million iTunes U and 600,000 iBook Author downloads in 5 days from its launch.
Launching both apps on January 19 at Apple’s education-focused event, Eddy Cue announced an all new iTunes U app that give users access to iTunes U content all in one place, rather than having to dig through iTunes to get to it.
There have been 700 million downloads of iTunes U content, with thousands of universities using it, including the number one content provider, Open University. The new app featuring interactive elements, allowing teachers to post messages to the ‘class’ and get feedback, as well as deliver assignments. Teachers can set things like office hours right from the app.
iBooks Author allows authors to create interactive works for publishing on Apple’s new iBooks 2 platform.
Armed with the new app, users will be able to choose from a template to create their books (much like the wizard in Microsoft Word) allowing them to drag and drop elements into the page and position them with ease.
Similar to Keynote and Pages, authors can embed galleries and elements, but also include JavaScript and HTML5 code, providing them with the ability to deliver truly custom content from their computer or the Web.
Analysts had originally estimated that iBooks Author had been downloaded 90,000 times in three days after launching, recording more than 350,000 textbook downloads from its iBookstore.
The figure was offered by Global Equities Research, which monitored downloads on Apple’s iBookstore platform using its proprietary tracking system.
Apple today announced its earnings for its first fiscal quarter of 2012. Apple’s revenue amounted to $46.33B in Q1. With earnings of $13.87 per share. The company’s net profit in Q1 was $13.06B. These numbers destroyed industry estimates across the board in every area of hardware sales and profitability aside from iPods.
Apple sold 37.04M iPhones, up 128% year over year, and 15.43M iPads this quarter, up 111% year over year. Apple sold 5.2M Macs during the quarter, bringing sales up 26% when compared to the same quarter a year ago. iPod sales were down 21%
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.