It’s starting to seem like it wouldn’t be January without an Apple event, as the company announced on Wednesday morning that it will hold an education-related shindig in New York City next week. The fun starts on January 19, at 10 a.m. Eastern/7 a.m. Pacific.

The invitation received by Macworld shows a New York City skyline drawn on a chalkboard, with the outline of an Apple logo in the middle. The event has some swanky digs, too—the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue.

Rumors of a January Apple event first surfaced earlier this month, and they’d already crystallized around some sort of education topic. Given the New York City location, it also seems reasonable that publishing is in some way involved—perhaps an initiative for bringing textbooks to iOS devices? Will we finally see a version of iBooks for the Mac?

We’ll have to wait until next week for those questions to be answered, but rest assured that Macworld will be on hand with live coverage on January 19, so join us back here then.

When Apple executives take the stage at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Thursday, they’ll be kicking off more than an education-themed press event. It will also mark the first of two Apple announcements within the space of a week.

Six days after Apple’s January 19 event in New York, the company will hold court once again, this time with Wall Street analysts as Apple announces its quarterly performance for its fiscal first quarter of 2012. Both events figure to draw a healthy amount of attention, as they’ll be Apple’s first public pronouncements of the new year.

Thursday’s event starts at 7 a.m. PT; Macworld will have live coverage of the event from New York.

As with most Apple briefings, the company has kept a tight lid on what it plans to unveil, other than saying any announcements would focus on education. That, coupled with the fact that Apple is straying from its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters to hold the event in New York, the capital of the book publishing industry, has fueled speculation that Thursday’s announcement will involve electronic textbooks. While Apple’s iPad has made inroads in the classroom, earlier reports from AllThingsD have played down the possibility of any hardware announcements like a new tablet on Thursday.

All we know for certain about Apple’s upcoming press event on January 19 is what it says on the invitation: It’s at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and it’s focused on education.

Sure, an education event doesn’t have the same broad appeal as one with a teaser like “Let’s Talk iPhone,” but still—this is an Apple event. We’re all eager to learn just what Cupertino plans to announce, but in the meantime, we’ll prognosticate about it instead.

To discuss the many and varied possibilities, we assembled a crack team of experts. Sadly, they declined to contribute to the article, and so it was left to us to stroke our chins and pontificate on what Apple might educate us about next week. Then we released each other’s chins and started writing. And, as you’ll see, we kept interrupting each other.

iBook ’em, Danno

Apple already offers an extensive amount of education content, as anybody who’s ever delved into the iTunes U section of the iTunes Store well knows. There, you can find lectures and classes from some of the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, including Oxford and MIT.

But as the old rhyme “No more pencils, no more books” suggests, books and learning go together like James Bond and vodka martinis. Which, coincidentally, go together like learning and vodka martinis—which is to say, quite well. And while Apple’s iBookstore offers plenty of educational books, the company to date can’t rival the breadth, depth, and rental-based affordability of Amazon textbook offerings. Plus, in a day and age where even pilots are replacing heavy binders of paper with iPads, shouldn’t we try to save the perpetually bowed backs of students everywhere by according them the same option?