Apple has announced some changes to the iBookstore today in an iTunes Connect letter to content publishers. Like the App Store, promo codes for iBooks can now be offered to iTunes users. Screenshots can also now be submitted for iBooks titles. This change follows the release of iBooks Author and Apple’s entrance into the digital textbook industry.
Apple’s new iBooks Author application for Mac is an impressive piece of work, even more so when you consider that it costs nothing. Although easy to use compared to many other page layout apps, it’s still quite a lengthy and complicated process to produce a book with it. It’s also squarely aimed at the education market. It was designed for the creation of textbooks.
So what if you want to make a shorter, simpler ebook? What if your kids want to make one? iBooks Author, for all its benefits, would probably be overkill. Enter, stage right, Book Creator for iOS. This five-dollar app lets you create simple ebooks on your iPad with very little fuss.
If you have ever used iBooks or the Kindle app on your iPhone or iPad, you probably have experienced virtual page turning… and probably turned it off shortly thereafter.
Why? Well, virtual page turning is just a fancy animation that does nothing practical. It slows the reading experience down (however minutely) just to give you a little millisecond voyage through an e-reading uncanny valley.
After all, in the real world, pages do more than just flip: you can rifle through them, bend them back, check multiple spots in a book at once, bookmark places with your fingers, etc. Wouldn’t it be cool if your iPad’s virtual page-turning animations could do the same things?
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.
Here’s a cool concept video for page-turning techniques in ebooks, which rather puts the current offerings to shame.
It shows an e-book behaving much more like a paper book, thanks to new ways of recognizing finger taps and swipes.
There’s been a lot of fuss overnight about what exactly Apple is claiming ownership of in the Terms and Conditions associated with its new iBooks Author application for Mac. The fuss is understandable, because the wording of the license agreement gets a little bit muddy.
What do Dr. Seuss, William Faulkner, J.K. Rowling, George Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Stephen King have in common? All six were repeatedly rejected when trying to publish their first famous novel. With the announcement of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author, Apple isn’t just giving the education system a much needed boost: they’re attempting to resurrect the dying art of the written word by taking absolute power out of the hands of publishers and putting it in the hands of aspiring writers. We’re on the cusp of a renaissance.
Following the release of Apple’s self-publishing tool for the Mac today, iBooks Author, it’s clear that Apple wants to change the way books are created and published online. Specifically, Apple wants to bolster its own iBookstore with the best content, and authors will have to agree with that mission whether they want to or not. If you want to make money, it’s the iBookstore or the highway.
Eager to try the new iBooks Author tools? Better have an iPad. In fact, even if you do have one, you can’t even preview what your e-book will look like on an iPad itself without connecting the device to your computer.
What a bummer. That’s convoluted, and cuts right out authors who want to publish their e-books through the iBookstore without necessarily spending $499 on a device first. Considering there’s already an iOS simulator as part of Apple’s development tools package, why didn’t they just hook iBooks Author’s preview functionality up to that?
[Thanks for the tip, Roger!]
If you missed this morning’s Education Event at the Guggenheim in New York City and our live blog coverage wasn’t good enough for you, Apple has posted up the full footage of the event over on their site. You can stream it here or download through iTunes here.
It was a fantastic event, but man, do I wish Steve could have been there.
Today’s Education Event at the Guggenheim in New York City was by all reports supposed to be “demure,” but that didn’t stop Apple from making a big splash. In fact, today’s event may have marked the most concerted attempt by Apple to revolutionize the classroom since the original Apple IIe.
Among today’s announcements? A new version of iBooks that makes textbooks on an iPad fully interactive, along with free authoring tools so easy-to-use and revolutionary that literally any author can create a beautifully formatted interactive e-book. Coupled with iTunes U — perhaps the most comprehensive classroom learning software ever — and a pledge to keep the price of all textbooks at $14.99, Apple’s goals are clear: they want to get an iPad in the hands of every student in the country.
There’s only one problem, right now: the lack of a budget iPad. It’s a problem Apple can (and should) fix.
For a “small, demure event,” Apple announced a shocking amount of new stuff at today’s Education Event: a new version of iBooks with e-textbook support, iTunes U’s new virtual classroom app, iBook Author (which should revolutionize home publishing) and even several incredible, interactive textbooks. We’re wondering, though, of all this stuff, which of today’s announcements do you find most revolutionary, most exciting?
Tick off your answer in the poll above, then join us in the comments, where we’ll be discussing what Apple’s announcements mean for the future of iOS and the e-book industry.
With today’s announcement of iBooks Author and iBooks 2, Apple intends on making expensive, bulky textbooks and exploding book bags a thing of the past. But one thing they didn’t mention is that while an iPad 2 may be thinner than a traditional textbook, iBook textbooks gain bulk in a different way: the files are absolutely huge.
Following the launch of iBooks 2 and the introduction of textbooks to the iBookstore, Apple has pushed out iTunes update 10.5.3 with support for textbook syncing to the iPad.
Apple has set a groundbreaking price for its high school textbooks. Thanks to the partnerships between top publishers Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Apple will be able to offer high school textbooks for $14.99 or less.
Now Phil Schiller is back on stage, and he’s here to tell us all how these amazing iBooks 2 e-textbooks have been created: a new app called iBooks Author, exclusively for the Mac.
Roger Rosner, VP for Productivity Software, has just come up on stage to show off some textbooks using iBooks 2. And it looks pretty amazing.
Phil Schiller took the stage at Apple’s education event in New York City to announce the company’s plans for reinventing textbooks. Schiller said that textbooks are currently “not durable” “not interactive” and “not searchable.”
Apple will change all that with its new software for iPad: iBooks 2.
Apple’s education event in New York City this morning may see the launch of a new version of the company’s Pages word processor which will feature support for iBooks publishing, and an iBooks application that will allow us to read our favorite titles on our Macs. Furthermore, we could also see the launch of textbook rentals.
Not much is known about Apple’s upcoming event on Thursday, January 19th. The entire industry seems to agree that Apple is ready to lead the way into a new frontier of digital textbooks through the iBookstore. Others suggest that the announcement will focus on making the world of digital publishing more attractive to authors — think “GarageBand for eBooks.”
Apple has reportedly been working with multiple publishers for months in preparation for its top secret event this week. Publishing house McGraw-Hill is expected to be one of the publishing houses present at the announcement at the Guggenheim museum in New York City.
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.
You know that media event Apple plans on throwing later this month in New York City, featuring Senior VP Eddy Cue? Well, more details have leaked out, and it appears we were right: Apple’s preparing to revolutionize textbooks.
If you’re a big fan of The Beatles’ psychotropic adventure to save Pepperland from the hopping foots and music-hating Blue Meanies, here’s a great deal: Apple is offering the children’s e-book adaptation of The Beatles Yellow Submarine for free to anyone who wants to download it.
Apple has issued an update to its iBooks app on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Version 1.5 of iBooks brings two major additions: a nighttime reading theme and full-screen mode.
The update also brings several new fonts, more covers for public domain books, pop-up footnotes, and a redesigned annotation palette.
Ray Bradbury is a living legend of futurism, and short of Tolkein and Asimov, probably the most important writer of fantasy and science-fiction in the 20th Century. He’s also a feisty old technophobic grampaw who would rather smash an iPad into pieces with his walking stick than read a book on one. That’s just one reason why Bradbury’s most famous book, Fahrenheit 451, has never been available in e-book form up until now.
The other reason? The novel famously describes a future dystopia in which books are burned on sight by a totalitarian government, and Bradbury has long contented that the power of the premise goes away when you’re reading it on a medium besides paper.
Bradbury’s had to suck up his objections to iPhones and iPads, though. The 91-year-old author has finally lived to see Fahrenheit 451 comes to iBooks and Kindles.