Did McGraw-Hill Get Bitch-Slapped During iPad Keynote?

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A day before Apple’s media event at the Yerba Buena Vista Center in San Fransico McGraw-Hill’s CEO decided to spill the beans and confirmed on TV that Apple is going to launch a tablet that will run iPhone OS. He also implied that McGraw-Hill will offer lots of eBooks to future tablet owners.

Nobody bothered to deny everything the next day, not even Apple. But that doesn’t mean that McGraw-Hill didn’t have to suffer the wrath of Apple. Remember when Jobs talked about the eBook features of the iPad? At a certain point a huge slide displayed the names of Apple’s future partners that will fill the iBook Store with eBooks. Guess what name was missing from that board? You got it, McGraw-Hill wasn’t there!

Is this Apple’s response to the accidental confirmation of the tablet from Terry McGraw:

On the other hand it looks like McGraw-Hill is trying to convince everyone that they haven’t said what we know they said on TV. Steven Weiss, a spokesman for the publishing company commented on the situation:

[Mr. McGraw]‘s speculative comments about Apple’s pending launch, which he shared earlier in the day in a call with investors, were simply intended to suggest that if the new device were to use iPhone applications, many of our education products would be compatible with the technology and could be made easily available on it.

It remains to be seen if future McGraw-Hill will provide content to Apple’s iPad owners. Although in the end Apple will probably get over the whole thing as Cupertino needs as much content as possible in its future eBook store in order to properly fight the Kindle and Amazon’s collection of digital books.

In all fairness we have to also consider the fact that we might just be wrong. Maybe Terry McGraw simply said something everyone already knew: “Apple tablet” and “iPhone OS”. And maybe Apple didn’t care as the company didn’t have an agreement with McGraw-Hill which would explain why Steve Jobs didn’t mention them during the keynote.