Although Apple’s education-focused event announcing textbook sales through the iBooks store occurred less than two weeks ago, industry analysts report that more than 350,000 textbooks have been sold in the iBook format. Additionally, as many as 90,000 copies of Apple’s textbook authoring tool have been downloaded.

In an event on January 19, 2012, Apple announced a new initiative to bring textbooks to iOS devices, with an obvious focus on the iPad. Similar to their previous efforts to bring computers into schools, this new announcement seems to be an effort to put iPads into the hands of students across America—and if early sales numbers are any indication, they might succeed, at least in the K-12 education system.

However, many believe the push to digital textbooks in university curriculums will be an uphill battle, with the primary concerns being the differing economic situation of students and the sheer quantity of textbooks used by most colleges. A spokesperson for Barnes and Noble’s college textbook division was quoted as saying, ““In a lecture hall of 250 students, all with different economic concerns, one might have an iPad, another a PC, another a print rental…. We’re moving into a digital world, but we have a long way to go.”

Unlike middle and high schools where school districts increasingly provide technology such as laptops to students to facilitate learning, most colleges expect students to buy their own equipment, which makes standardization difficult. A textbook can’t be offered solely in digital form if some students don’t have access to such a device. Additionally, while K-12 education often uses a fairly limited number of textbooks and other materials, university education demands a wide variety of textbooks, which presents an obvious problem in digitizing every textbook a college student might need.

In any case, Apple’s early sales numbers look promising, and most reviews of the textbooks themselves have been positive. The shift to a digital learning world is coming—it’s just taking longer than we would like.

Before long, your computer is going to be watching your every move—Microsoft is reportedly working on integrating the Kinect motion sensor into laptops. The Kinect, which is a special Xbox peripheral that uses a camera and microphone to watch and listen to a user for commands, has been successfully hacked to work on a computer by hobbyists, but the device would need to be modified significantly to work in a portable product such as a laptop.

The Kinect was released in early November 2010, but hasn’t been overly successful as a gaming controller due to fairly poor participation by game studios. Its uses as a user interface controller have been decidedly more interesting; only a few weeks after the Kinect hit shelves, videos were posted online of people using the device to play a piano as they tapped imaginary keys on a desk, control robotic arms, and navigate through web pages.

Microsoft has been surprisingly supportive of open-source Kinect products, and has released an SDK to allow programmers to more easily access its functions. This news about integrating a Kinect sensor into laptops could lead to Minority Report-esque interfaces in the future, with users speaking commands to their computers and businessmen in airports waving their arms around to view documents on their laptops.

Microsoft provided no estimates as to when we might actually see laptops with motion tracking features, but we do know that they will be licensing the technology to manufacturers rather than building a solution in-house.