books - page 3

A new Apple patent application purchased by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office details a new system that may one day allow you to sell or lend on your “used” digital goods, such as iTunes purchases and software you’ve downloaded from the App Store.

Apple details a system that could see used goods sold through their original marketplaces, like those mentioned above, or directly between users.

Apple has today introduced a new featured section to the U.S. iTunes Store called “Breakout Books,” which offers a hand-picked collection of self-published iBooks from emerging talents. New books are added “as the begin taking off,” according to the Cupertino company, helping you quickly discover your next great read.

The Bookcase is a three-dollar pocket database for your book collection, one that takes its role very seriously and might be best suited to people with a professional requirement to manage a large library.

Marvin is a neat little e-book reader for iOS – free for now, but likely to cost about $2 by next week. It’s packed with useful features for serious readers and students, plus some ingenious new ideas we’ve not seen in other e-book reading apps.

You know how Apple is always calling its products “magical?” Well, it turns out that it may be right. Harry Potter author J.K Rowling not only uses a MacBook Air to write, but says that it has changed her life.

The iPhone isn’t the only thing that looks more handsome when it gets taller and thinner. Bookbindery cases get better looking too, as you can see with event he quickest glance and Pad&Quill’s new Little Pocket Book. Stretched lengthwise and squashed a little depth-wise, it’s “thinnest we have ever made,” says P&Q honcho Brian Holmes.

The various bookbindery cases for the iPad are great and all, but I always found them to be a little impractical. They look lovely, they offer a ton of protection, but they do tend to get in the way. But the Kindle, made to be read like a book, seems tailor-made for a book-like cover. And here it is, the Hardcover for Kindle Touch from Dodo.

Path just pushed out a new update to its iPhone app, introducing a number of nifty new features. Users now have the ability to share their favorite films and books, send personal invitations with their own message to their friends, snap photos using the volume button and then edit them with Path’s new tools, and more.

Pad&Quill’s Littlest Black Book case was announced back on April 1st, and it still seems like a joke. However, I have one next to my keyboard as I type this and it is very real. And very, very cute.

One of the ironic twists about the anti-trust lawsuits against Apple and the major publishing companies is that Apple’s entrance into the ebook market actually broke Amazon’s virtual monopoly on the ebook business. In the process, publishers gained the ability to control ebook pricing, which can be seen as actually encouraging competition in the industry.

While the U.S. Department of Justice and attorneys general from many states are pursuing lawsuits around the matter, not every country would see the situation in the same terms as the U.S. government. In France, for example, publishers can legally control pricing and are protected from booksellers undercutting their business as Amazon had been doing with its power over the ebook market. It’s even possible that France’s laws protecting publishers may have served as inspiration for the agency model that Apple used in building the iBookstore.

I can imagine that the reaction you get from mentioning the word “jailbreak” within the Apple camp in Cupertino is almost identical to that you get when mentioning the word “bomb” on an airplane. In fact, Apple hates the word so much that it considers it an expletive, and it’s now filtering it from the iTunes Store.

One of the big things missing from Lightroom — Adobe’s excellent photo processing app — was printing. Not boring old printing where you have a big, expensive box in the corner of your office spit out endless sheets of paper until one of them is right. No, we mean remote printing, where you choose some images, hit a button and, a short while later, a gorgeous book appears on your doorstep.

Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture have had this for a while. Now, thanks to Blurb, the brand-new Lightroom 4 has it too.

The DRM restriction that prevents Apple’s iBooks from being opened on other devices can now be removed by the latest version of a free DRM removal tool. Requiem 3.3, a piece of software that is incredibly popular for removing the DRM from music and videos purchased from the iTunes Store, has been updated to crack e-books purchased from the iBookstore.

You might have suspected that the right music – whether it’s thrash metal or Mozart – keeps you more focused or relaxed.

Now a trio of brain researchers have studied the effects of playlists on the brain, resulting in a nifty little book called  Your Playlist Can Change Your Life. In the book’s 200-or so pages, they explain how to use specific playlists to alleviate anxiety, promote concentration, get happy or move into a flow state thanks to Brain Music Treatment or BMT.

If you can’t make it to New York for BMT therapy, for $9.99, you can also download a Common BMT File. Created from more than 2,000 people’s brain waves with the help of evidence-based BMT tech, they say it acts as a kind of aural “first-aid” before you get your own playlists together.

Intrigued (my current nightstand read is Mark Changizi’s excellent Harnessed about music and the brain), I talked to author Dr. Galina Mindlin about what playlists have the most impact, cleaning up your music collection and her current heavy rotations.

If you thought there would be little interest in an Apple event that didn’t include new hardware, think again. Following the unveiling of iBooks 2 with support for textbooks last week, Apple saw an incredible 350,000 textbook downloads in just three days of availability.

A group of Chinese authors have reportedly filed a lawsuit against Apple in Beijing claiming that the Cupertino company is infringing copyright with books sold through its iBookstore. The Chinese financial magazine Caixin reports that nine authors from the China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS) are involved in the suit, which is hoping to secure 11.9 million yuan ($1.9 million) in compensation.

Can’t get enough of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography? Apparently neither can he. Isaacson is now saying he plans to expand the Steve Jobs bio to include annotations and new addendums.

Still shopping around for last minute gifts for your friends or family? Consider these three books authored by Cult of Mac writers, which may be just what you’re looking for.

Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs is due out on Monday, but already a sad revelation from the book has come to light: Steve Jobs delayed the first operation on his pancreatic cancer back in 2004, ignoring the urgent pleas of his wife, friends and colleagues.

Can’t wait to get your hands on Steve Jobs official biography later this year? How about biding your time with a tome of wisdom handed down from The Man himself? Then Steve Jobs Gives 11 Advices To Teenager! by Steve Jobs might be just the book for you!

Remember Comic Life – the awesome application for creating comic books out of your photos that used to be bundled with Intel Macs? Well, now it’s available on the iPad; taking the latest functionality from the desktop application and wrapping it up into an easy to use touch interface.

Comic Life for iPad has everything you need for creating and sharing comics, including fun and quirky templates, stylized image filters, and an easy-to-use drag and drop placement. You have full control over the design of your comics with a huge selection design options – colors, fonts, gradients, balloons, captions, panels and more.

Create comics out of the photos in your device’s photo library, then add balloons, captions, lettering and templates to tell your story; while the smart text layout and image filtering functions ensure your projects always look fantastic.

Use the integrated e-reader to view your creations in fullscreen, and when they’re ready for the big time, share them with your friends via Facebook and email. You can also print your comics via AirPrint and share them between other iPads with the intuitive ‘drag & drop’ feature.

Comic Life from Plasq is currently on sale for a limited time to celebrate its App Store release. Grab it now for $7.99!

I wasn’t really surprised by the popularity of my post Apple Publishes Six Free Electronic Books for Developers since I’ve been telling everyone that developer topics would be popular and you delivered. That post was re-tweeted 253 times and shared on Facebook 92 times which isn’t to shabby for a short news blurb about books for iOS developers. So, the good news out of all this is that I’ll be covering more developer related topics on Cult of Mac in the future. Especially due to all the nice comments on the above post.

Therefore let’s get started by taking the six free books and adding some good books that are worth purchasing to your reading list. If you are interested in iOS development then you should not overlook these books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Apple’s passing out Christmas gifts early for Mac and iOS developers. The company is offering six development books covering Mac OS X and iOS development — for free.

The new eBooks aren’t really new, but they haven’t been available in the iBookstore until today. Previously developers could either read them online or download PDF versions to read later via developer.apple.com.

The six titles include: Cocoa Fundamental’s Guide, The Objective-C Programming Language, iOS Application Programming Guide, Object Oriented Programming With Objective-C, iOS Technology Overview, and iOS Human Interface Guidelines.

You can download these books to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad from the iBookstore.

It was a month ago to the day that I ditched physical books, comics, and magazines for my iPad. A round-the-world trip for work precipitated the change. For 29 days, I would be outside the U.S., with stops in Australia, Singapore, India, and the UK. Not to mention that the India stop included three cities and four additional flights. It was not the time for a big stack of physical media, nor for a full laptop. It was time to travel light and to travel digital.

In the process, I’ve learned a lot. Some of it more boring, self-discovery kind of stuff, which I’ll save for my personal blog, if at all, but a lot of it about tablets, computers, and where entertainment itself might go.

1. The current iPad is good enough for most uses.
In spite of my promise to wait for the iPad 2, the thought of a total of 65 hours on planes quickly converted me to the quite-capable version 1.0. I really put it through its paces: web-browsing, Twitter, RSS reader, Facebook, blogging, video, gaming, and book-reading. Despite its early generation, it’s wholly adequate for most of these tasks. It is weakest, as many people have noted, for typing. If you can get it perfectly flat, as on a tray table in an airplane, it’s possible to hit a near touch-typing speed, but any other grip means going slow and making mistakes. Though some have complained about its anemic 256 MB of RAM, I found it plenty speedy for every task I threw at it. The absence of video cameras for video chat was a minor nuisance.

Are you planning on writing a book? Do you want to be the next Mark Twain? Or are you a starving author looking to cut out the middle man so you can keep all the profits from the sale of your book? It appears that your time has come — Barnes and Noble has announced PubIt! an alternative to self-publishing in the iBookstore.

PubIt! is a new self-publishing platform that will allow authors to directly upload the books they’ve written to the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. Once uploaded Barnes and Noble acts as your books distributor. The books will be sold as bona-fide ebooks and the author gets to keep a nice portion of the profits from each ebook sale. Book prices range from $1 to $200. You will earn 65% on books sold for under $10, but only 40% on books that are more than $10.

It works by accepting your book as a digital upload in HTML, RTF, TXT, or Microsoft Word. The file will be converted from one of these formats into an ePub formatted file. In less than a week your book will appear and go on sale in the Barnes and Noble eBookstore. The book will be available to Nook owners as well as Nook app users on the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac.

Self-publishing is getting a lot easier as PubIt! joins Amazon and Apple by offering a competing service that gives authors another option they can choose from. Authors can keep more of their profits since there is no agent or publisher to share them with. So start your word processors people! Or just dust of your copy of Adobe Indesign and get to work!