At Apple’s event today in New York, Apple unveiled iBooks2, a new version of its iBooks software that is tailored to interactive textbooks, and iBooks Author, an app that makes it free and simple to create interactive textbooks for the iPad.

There are already thousands of digital textbooks available on the iPad, as well as on other devices like PCs and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet. But as my colleague Annie Corbett and I have written, e-textbooks are a transitional product, accounting for only 2.8% of the $8 billion US higher education textbook market in 2010, according to the National Association of College Stores. The vast majority of digital textbooks are not very innovative; they’re essentially print replicas with digital extensions like highlighting, search, and annotation. The iPad — which now outsells Macs in schools, according to Apple — is capable of much more than what has previously been produced, and Apple hasn’t been satisfied with the status quo. Today, Apple demonstrated iBooks2, a new textbook experience for the iPad; these new textbooks can be created using iBooks Author. iBooks2 will solve two product strategy problems for publishers:

• Production cost. Companies like Inkling are doing quite well helping publishers take their education apps to the next level. The problem is that publishers’ content creation and production processes are still optimized for print, not digital, so working with Inkling is expensive (in terms of publishers’ labor, not necessarily Inkling’s fees). So most publishers opt to create a small number of new apps and settle for digital replicas or “enhanced eBooks” of everything else.

Today Amazon revealed its new Kindle lineup, including a touchscreen E Ink eReader and Amazon’s first color touchscreen tablet, the Kindle Fire. I can’t say I’m surprised. The day the iPad launched, my colleague James McQuivey wrote that Amazon should “go head to head with Apple on a media tablet.” In March of this year, I wrote that “iPad 2 won’t have much competition in 2011, unless it’s from Amazon,” and more recently I published a report outlining the competitive advantages and disadvantages Amazon’s product strategists will face if they launch a tablet.

Looking back at that report, here’s what we got right:

• Amazon is competing on price, content, and commerce. The Kindle Fire, a 7-inch Wi-Fi only device, will retail for $199—less than half the price of the iPad, less than the 7-inch Barnes & Noble Nook Color, BlackBerry Playbook, and HTC Flyer. As I predicted, Amazon is indeed drawing on all its content and commerce assets including video, music, games, as well as magazines, apps, and services—the Kindle Fire comes with a 30-day free subscription to Amazon Prime, and a pre-installed Amazon shopping app. It also features a spiffy custom-built browser, called Amazon Silk, which interfaces with EC2, Amazon’s cloud server, to optimize performance. (Meaning: it’s really fast.)

We’ve been beating the Amazon tablet drum for a while—in fact, as early as April 2010, my colleague James McQuivey wrote that Amazon's product strategists should “go head to head” with Apple and create its own tablet. Now, on the cusp of Amazon actually doing so (perhaps as early as October), we’re turning up the volume with a new report explaining exactly how, and why, Amazon will disrupt the tablet market.

This report has been in the works for months. We held off publishing it last week out of respect for Steve Jobs, and we have great admiration for his inventions and influence on our culture.

Even though Amazon taking on Apple is a bit like David taking on Goliath (compare the market cap, profits, and cash position of the two companies), Amazon’s willingness to sell hardware at a loss combined with the strength of its brand, content, cloud infrastructure, and commerce assets makes it the only credible iPad competitor in the market. If Amazon launches a tablet at a sub-$300 price point — assuming it has enough supply to meet demand — we see Amazon selling 3-5 million tablets in Q4 alone.

Amazon’s quick ascension in the tablet market will completely disrupt the status quo. Apple will retain dominant market share, but Amazon will cause product strategists at:

We are publishing a new Forrester report today on the European tablet market. With the recent launch (and huge marketing push) of the Acer Iconia Tab and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in multiple European countries, one might think that things were looking up for Android tablets in Europe — but that’s not the case. In our report, we found that:

• Europe is, and will be, a huge market for tablets. We are projecting that EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) will account for 14.5 million, or 30%, of worldwide consumer tablet sales in 2011. Three times as many Europeans as have tablets today say they are interested in buying one in the future.
• Outside the UK, Apple could be vulnerable to competition. Apple has 52 Apple Stores in Europe, and 30 of them are in the UK. (For reference, there are 238 Apple Stores in the US.) Apple’s brand and channel presence is not uniformly strong in Europe; Mac ownership, for example, is lower in every EU-7 country than it is in the US.
• But no competitor has met Apple’s challenge. Despite Apple’s potential vulnerability, we estimate that Apple still has 70% market share for tablet sell-through to consumers in Europe. (Sell-through is different from shipments; our interviews with European retailers confirmed that non-iPad tablet inventory is sitting in the channel — i.e., manufacturers are shipping more tablets than consumers are buying. So if you read reports that Apple has a lower market share, look at whether the report is measuring shipments or sell-through.) What’s more, non-iPad tablet competition is quite fragmented — OEMs, operators, and niche players form a crowded marketplace but one notably devoid of shoppers. iPad competitors’ prices are too high, and no competitor has matched Apple on content or channel strategy.