ebooks - page 5

When Apple announced iBooks Author in January, the company positioned the free ebook publishing tool as a way for faculty members of schools and colleges to create their own customized and interactive textbooks. However, since Apple allows the software to be used by anyone, it has become a tool for authors or organizations that want to self-publish either for personal distribution or for sale/download in the iBookstore.

While easy self-publishing tools may bring to mind the image of someone writing their first novel or a memoir, there are any number of ways to use both the publishing features of iBooks Author and the distribution channel of the iBookstore. One of which is as a marketing and informational tool – an approach that takes the concept of a white paper to a new and powerful interactive level.

J.K. Rowling’s enormously successful Harry Potter series is about an incompetent orphan who lucks his way through a series of magical adventures despite being essentially inept. Tens of millions of people — myself included! — have enjoyed them over the course of the last decade, but only in dead tree form. Bizarrely, Harry Potter has never officially come to e-books up until now.

Of course, no longer. As one last magical trick, Harry Potter has made the jump to a number of e-book stores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google and Sony. The only company left out? Apple’s iBookstore.

With the U.S. Department of Justice gearing up to slap Apple with an antitrust lawsuit, the Cupertino company has spoken out over claims it has teamed up with publishers to raise the price of e-books, and downplayed the threat from Amazon’s Kindle. It argues that it gave publishers the opportunity to set their own prices, and that it cannot be blamed for e-book price hikes.

The curtains have barely drawn to a close after Apple’s new iPad keynote, but the spotlight is still shinning on Cupertino, only this time in a negative way. A new report by the Wall Street Journal claims that Apple’s E-Book pricing has come under scrutiny of the U.S. Justice Department who is threatening to sue Apple for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books.

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.

Every Cult of Mac reader should know the name Ken Segall. Leander interviewed Ken back in 2009 about naming the iMac and making Apple’s ‘Think Different’ ad campaign. Ken now runs the hilarious Apple parody site called Scoopertino and his personal blog, Observatory.

As a man that worked with Steve Jobs personally, Ken has first-hand knowledge of what drives Apple as a business, and his insights into the creative marketing and branding industry are profound. He’s got a new book coming out called Insanely Simple, and you should be excited to get your hands on this one.

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.

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.

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!]

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.

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.

Today Amazon launched an iPad-optimized Kindle Store web app. Visiting amazon.com/iPadKindleStore on the iPad will now take you to Amazon’s new web portal for buying ebooks from Apple’s tablet.

Once you’ve logged into your Amazon account, you’ll be able to browse and purchase ebooks in Mobile Safari on the iPad. Your purchases will then be pushed by Amazon to your Kindle device or Kindle iOS app.

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.

Following a report that claims Nintendo is set to open up its own app store for its upcoming Wii U console, there are now suggestions that the Japanese gaming giant is “actively courting” iOS developers in a bit to lure them over to Wii U game development. One developer reports that the company even offered “assistance” with porting their title from iOS to be played on the console’s new controller, which features a 6.2-inch touchscreen.

Apple is planning a media event in New York this month, according to AllThingsD. While we shouldn’t expect to see the iPad 3 or a new Apple TV, AllThingsD’s usually-reliable sources have indicated the event will be “important,” but not “large-scale.”

Apple’s iCloud exec, Eddy Cue, is expected to show at the event in late Janurary. The last time Cue took the stage in New York was to help launch the iPad-only magazine by News Corp called The Daily.

It’s that time of year again. Not the holidays — I’m mean yeah, sure it is, but that’s pretty obvious. No, it’s the time of year when we drive ourselves (and others) a little crazy running around trying to find gifts at the last minute. Especially those pesky stocking stuffers — the little gifts that fill in the gap between “it’s Christmas? Geez, I completely forgot” and “honey, I bought you a Lexus.”

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.

Did Apple conspire with major publishers to increase e-book prices? The European Commission has launched an antitrust probe of Apple and five publishers amid claims the industry was “terrified” by Amazon’s $9.99 e-book push. At the heart is Apple’s iBookstore and the tech giant’s “agency model” that a California lawsuit charges inflated book prices.

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.

If you are a gamer like me, chances are you’ve spent the last couple of weeks pretending to be a slight-of-build, slightly effeminate elf or oil-slathered beefcake of a Nord in Bethesda’s new epic RPG, Skyrim.

The game (which sadly isn’t available on OS X) is detailed to the point of absurdity, but here’s one of the details that most emphasizes exactly how epic in scope and minutely detailed Skyrim is: in Skyrim, there are hundreds of in-game books to be found, equalling thousands of pages of text total. And most players never read a single page of them, because who wants to sit around in a game and read when there are orcs to hit with a flaming hammer?

If you’ve got an iPad (or Kindle, or iPhone, or Mac), though, there’s no reason these beautifully written in-game texts need to languish in obscurity. Just download this ePub file and read all of Skyrim’s text on your device of choice, not in some grubby dungeon somewhere.

Over the years, Steve wrote hundreds of mostly terse, often funny, irritable or persnickety emails to Apple customers who wrote him at steve@apple.com. Now a whole book of them is being published.

About twelve hours after iOS 5 was officially released, I went through the considerable bother of downgrading my iPad 2 back down to iOS 4.3. iOS 5 was a great update, but for me, it had one fatal problem: it broke my beloved Stanza e-reading app irrevocably, and going without Stanza on my iPad was as impossible to contemplate as living without Mail or Safari.

For Stanza lovers, the situation is extremely frustrating, because Stanza breaks so totally under iOS 5 that you can’t even load an ebook without the app crashing. However, the original developers can’t update the app, because they sold it to Amazon.

When Amazon originally bought Stanza back in 2009, they promised they weren’t buying Stanza just to kill some of the free competition to their own Kindle e-reader. And, in fact, Amazon has updated the product several times since 2009, notably to bring excellent iPad support to the app.

But with iOS 5, Amazon appears to have abandoned all support for Stanza. That’s particularly frustrating, because not only was Stanza the best non-commercial e-reader around, it had many features the competition still doesn’t have: for example, its excellent typesetting and formatting options, its wide range of supported formats and its killer swipe-to-dim feature, which makes reading ebooks easier on the eyes.

Thanks to the success of the Starbucks App Store ‘Pick of the Week’ promotion, Starbucks has announced that it will also be offering free eBook Picks of the Week in a partnership with iTunes and the iBookstore.

Michael Hart, founder of free ebooks repository Project Gutenberg, died this week. He was 64.