Apple plans to introduce tools to help create interactive e-books at its special media event on Thursday, January 19  and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users — a “GarageBand for e-books.”

Apple is expected to announce support for the recently-updated ePub 3 standard for iBooks, enabling a wider variety of multimedia and interaction features that are useful in a teaching environment. Jobs believed that textbook publishing was an “$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction.”

A recent study showed that 82 percent of all higher education students nationwide will come to campus with a smartphone.