Apple quietly unveiled a new program for educational institutions this week called the App Store Volume Purchase Program. The program will allow educational institutions to purchase and download apps from the App Store in volume, and it will also allow developers to offer volume discounting to those institutions.
The announcement was made through the iPhone Dev Center’s news page on Apple’s Web site, and details on the program are restricted to registered developers.
This marks a major step forward in Apple positioning iOS devices as an educational tool, something that Apple hasn’t appeared to be concentrating on from the outside. It could also be a step towards seeing iOS devices, specially the iPad, become more of a player in the textbook reader market.