Of course this is all still conjecture, but from the truncated versions I’ve read about the announcement Apple will soon make, it looks as though Apple is heading into the textbook market.

While I’m not surprised by this announcement, what I find most interesting is that it was mentioned in the Steve Jobs biography. In fact, making textbooks digital was one of Steve’s biggest goals with Apple.

I have no idea how publishers are going to react. Many still haven’t accepted digital books; some still think they are a passing trend.

In this NYT article, Apple Aims to Take On the Textbook Market, you can read more about the big announcement and what it involves. As always, Apple is grandstanding. But I don’t look for any new devices coming out soon. This time it appears to be all about going after the textbook market.

The event will showcase a new push by Apple into the digital textbook business, but will not feature any new devices, according to a person close to the company who did not want to be identified talking about it before it occurred.

What does surprise me is that Steve Jobs is still actually working posthumously. This concept, according to his bio, was something he cared about passionately. And thinking back to when I was a college student, schlepping huge heavy textbooks from one end of a huge campus to the other, I think it’s about time textbooks went digital. I just hope they can keep the costs down, unlike what they’ve done with digital books priced at 9.99 or higher.