Apple’s new textbook program seems to be going well

350,000 textbooks have been downloaded from Apple in the first three days it’s been offering them, this according to All Things D, which cites information from analysts at Global Equities Research. These numbers aren’t coming from Apple, mind you, so take them with however many grains of salt you wish but the report also says 90,000 people downloaded the new iBooks Author (the Garage Band of publishing) as well. I have no idea how those textbook downloads compare to overall textbook usage aside from being  a drop in a bucket. But it has to be encouraging for Apple that it’s on to something. The plan is to sell digital books to a school for one school year and then the school assigns them to students on school iPads. On average, schools order textbooks every five years so these will be more current, a valuable thing especially in social sciences.