With the launch launch of iBooks 2, which gets a new section for digital textbooks and iBooks Author, which allows content creators to create multi-touch books for iPad last week, Apple hopes to reinvent textbooks.

According to initial reports, things seem to have started off quite well for Apple. AllThingsD reports that according to Trip Chowdhry – an analyst at Global Equities Research, iPad users in the U.S. downloaded approximately 350,000 iBooks Textbooks from the iBookstore over the first three days of availability.

If the numbers are to be believed, Apple’s digital textbooks seems to have caught the fancy of content creators as well as according to Chowdhry, iBooks Author was downloaded more than 90,000 users from the Mac App Store.

According to Global Equities Research, the supply chain markup on textbooks ranges between 33 percent and 35 percent. So there are savings to be had in cutting out that publisher-to-distributor-to-wholesaler-to-retailer process.

Add to this the lower cost of iBook production, which the research outfit estimates to be 80 percent less than print publication — and a system under which textbooks are sold directly to students, who use them for a year, rather than to schools which keep the texts for an average of five years — and the math here starts to looks pretty good. 

The analyst believes that “this could be the recipe for Apple’s success in the textbook industry”.

Though iBooks 2 and iBooks Author have received positive reviews from experts, iBooks Author’s EULA, which states that books created through the tool can be sold only through the iBookstore, has sparked a controversy.

Have you downloaded any of the digital textbook’s available in iBooks? Let us know your views about them in the comments.