Apple textbooks and EPUB 3 vs. EPUB 2

It took some time to get back with a new post. May be the fact that nothing really interesting happens should be considered a reason.
Well .. actually things happen but are any of those things really revolutionary?
The last few days I was bombarded with information about the Apple textbook initiative. This really looks revolutionary but it is not. It is just a company that has enough power to try to disrupt what everybody thinks that it has to be changed. On the other hand they are trying to much to secure the revenue from this. This is too visible to alow the program to be revolutionary. They are just flexing some muscle.
On the other hand I can't say I don't appreciate the effort. At least they do something. This is not somethig to be said about anything in the commercial or open source / public area.

To be fair I did not even bothered to look for details about the format. I suppose they decided to do what it takes to have something viable and this is what they should. If you care too much about the standards nothing new will get in front. The format is just a matter of strategy ... Tim Cook is good at executing things and I'm sure it has the strategy. Considering the fact that they havea product on the market they definitely have also a vision .... whether this vision is correctly targeted with the strategy and aligned with the market capacity to absorb something new is another thing to be seen.

The apple textbooks offer text wrap around objects, multimedia content and .. and actually that's all we can say about them.

If we look at the features that EPUB 3 bring on, I don't see a good reason for them to depart too much from the standard:

Feature	EPUB 2	EPUB  3	Functionality
CSS3 support	No	Yes	Better control over line break, hyphenation etc.
Multiple style sheets	No	Yes	Supports the ability to include multiple style sheets allowing for improved layout control
Embedded fonts	No	Yes	Allow fonts to be delivered along with the EPUB file.
SVG support	No	Yes	Bring on the vector graphic functionality to EPUB area. It was strange not to have something like that in a pure electronic publication.
epub: type	No	Yes	Support for semantic meaning
epub: trigger	No	Yes	Support for creation of  user interfaces for controlling multimedia objects.
XHTML 5 support	No	Yes	Inherits most of the definitions of semantics, structure and processing behaviours from HTML5
MathML	No	Yes	Direct embedding of MathML supported ... enables rendering of mathematics content as text instead of images
Scripting	No	Yes	Support for scripted content, ie interactivity, using JavaScript language
Audio&Video	No	Yes	Inherits support for HTML5 rich media elements

Apple had anything at hand in the standard. May be they just played with the implementation. This remains to be seen.
Wish you all the best.