Yesterday's big announcement by Apple was the release of iBooks Author and iBooks 2. iBooks Author is a Mac application and Apple's attempt at revolutionizing educational books whether they be textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books and more for iPad. With it, you can create all of the above and more via a classically easy to use Apple interface. iBooks 2 is the application you need to view publications created in iBooks Author.

To get you started quickly, there are lots of Apple-designed templates that merely require you to add your own text and drag and drop images.

To add interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote presentations, 3D objects and more, there are simple widgets which make things very easy indeed. The widgets are one of the outstanding features of iBooks Author. They enable you to add everything from a photo gallery to a Keynote (Keynote ’09 v5.1.1 or later) presentation and can be easily identified in your Table of Contents. You can also add a voice-over to make it easier for sight-impaired readers to read your books.

Google Books may be a good source for ebooks, but the browser window is definitely not the best interface to read them. It's uncomfortable, requires a lot of mouse scrolling and includes distracting elements such as links and ads. Luckily you can now use an alternative tool to read Google ebooks: it's called GooReader and lets you search, browse and read Google ebooks in a much nicer, more comfortable way.

GooReader reminds a me lot of iBooks,  mainly due to its wooden bookshelf background and the way books are displayed - shaped as 'real' books, with covers and bookmarks. You can use GooReader to search Google Books by title, author or Google Book_ID. Results are shown on the bookshelf like real-life books, with color-coded bookmarks: green means you can read the whole book, yellow grants a partial preview and red means the book is not available to read.