Apple’s iBookstore is reportedly heading to Japan this year, finally delivering its popular e-book store to the ever-growing number of Japanese iPad users. The Cupertino company is said to be in the process of negotiating deals with a “handful” of Japanese publishers to supply a local version of their titles at launch.
Apple has been having problems with Chinese writers suing for unlicensed eBook distribution in the App Store. After a group of writers asked Apple for 10 million yuan in damages for unlawfully distributing copyrighted works in certain Chinese apps, the court has forced Apple to pay a smaller settlement fee of 1.03 million yuan, which is only about $165,000.
When most people think of Apple they think of hardware. Apple’s got the iPhone, iPad, and iMac — and they also make their own software to power those devices — but one of Apple’s secret weapons is its gigantic media division.
iTunes was just updated last week, and you already know that it sells everything from books, Apps, newspapers, music, TV shows, movies and more. But did you know that iTunes would be one of the largest and most profitable media companies in the world if Apple decided to set up iTunes as a separate company?
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.
I have a book I’m reading that I received from a book publisher. It’s an ePub file, which works well with iBooks. Since I love the interface in iBooks, I loaded the file on my iPad 3 and my iPad mini, so I would have it at home on the larger iPad and on the go on the smaller one. Sounds great, right?
I’d hoped to be able to sync my bookmarks, though, so I could bookmark the novel on one device and then pull up the bookmark on the next device I was reading it on. I couldn’t. I spent some time messing about on the internet, trying to figure out how to fix this issue. Apple has the answer, and it’s a lot simpler than I thought.
Flipboard’s already one of the best ways to read and discover web content on the iPad and iPhone, and now they’re taking that to the next level, integrating e-book discovery by tapping right into the Apple iBookstore. It’s like browsing in a virtual e-book shop.
Spotlight is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated features of iOS. I know so many people who don’t use it, yet I find it indispensable when it comes to searching for emails, notes, contacts, and apps I’ve hidden in a folder somewhere. And with SLightEnhancerSearch, a new tweak for jailbroken iOS devices, it’s even better.
SLightEnhancerSearch enhances Spotlight by introducing the ability to search YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, the App Store, and lots more — right from your home screen.
It’s no secret that Apple often takes a puritanical view of art featuring human anatomy — the flapping genitalia, dewy folds and turgid protuberances that some of us find so arousing and others find a moral failing — at least when it comes to being submitted to the App Store or iBookstore.
So it’s no surprise that when Danish author Peter Øvig Knudsen submitted his latest work of non-fiction, Hippie 2, to the iBookstore, the e-book was rejected based upon the fact that it contained forty-seven photographs of hairy frolicking hippies with exposed breasts, buttocks and genitals.
What is more surprising is that they also rejected Knudsen’s resubmitted version of the text, which featured all of the photos censored with giant red apples.
Sony has become the latest company to bring its digital book service to iOS with the new Reader app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Available to download for free from the App Store, the app offers access to all the books you have stored in your Reader library, and allows you to sync your bookmarks between other Reader devices.
Apple announced the next version of iBooks software at the iPad mini event earlier today, and version 3.0 has now gone live in the App Store. This major update to iBooks brings multiple enhancements, including continuos page scrolling, iCloud support, and integration with iOS 6’s sharing options. Publishers can now push out over-the-air updates for books purchased in the iBookstore as well.
Today’s iPad Mini event was incredible. Tim Cook and the gang just unleashed a tsunami of new Apple products on the world for the second straight month. Yes, the iPad Mini made an appearance, but there was so much more sweet stuff that it’s hard to keep up with all the details.
Rather than getting lost in the flood of thousands of different posts that will be written about the Apple event today, we’ve broken down all the necessary info into delicious bite-size information nuggets just for you, so you can know all the essentials.
Here’s everything that Apple announced at today’s keynote:
As you know, the upcoming media event for Apple’s smaller, thinner, and less expensive tablet, the as-yet-named iPad Air iPad mini, is being widely reported as happening on October 23,2012.
While the invites haven’t gone out yet, we’re seeing a rumor that the event will focus on iBooks, which makes a ton of sense considering that a smaller iPad is in the same market category as a device like the Amazon Kindle Fire, which is kind of like a souped-up eReader, with media consumption its main purpose, at least from Amazon’s perspective.
While this seems like a plausible rumor, I’m not ready to fully embrace it yet.
Apple has released a new digital user guide for the fifth-generation iPod touch, which was announced alongside the iPhone 5 back in September. The 138-page eBook covers “everything you need to know” about the device, and is available to download now — for free — from the iBookstore.
In addition to this, the new iPod touch has now received its first benchmarks, which reveal it’s packing an 800MHz dual-core A5 processor.
When iOS 6 rolls out tomorrow, you be able to download all five of Apple’s free iOS apps — including iBooks, iTunes U, Podcasts, Find My Friends, and Find My iPhone — with just one tap from the new App Store. The Cupertino company has introduced a new ‘Apple Apps’ page that greets first-time App Store users, and it features a button that will install all five apps at once.
Cheaper e-books would be great, right? According to industry executives, that may just happen in the next one to three months after a federal judge entered an approval of an antitrust settlement between several e-book publishers and the Justice Department itself.
In the final settlement today, publishers Lagardere, Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, and HarperCollins have the next 10 days to notify e-book retailers like Amazon that any previous agreements regarding e-book pricing are no longer valid. The deal gave publishers only seven days to notify Apple, interestingly enough.
According to the report in the Wall Street Journal, one executive, who asked to not be identified, said, “It could be pretty fast.”
The publishers have to let retailers out of any agreements that prevent discounting, and the retailers are also able to terminate said contracts within 30 days.
In a somewhat ironic move, the U.S. government has entered into an ebook deal with Apple that will see a range of government reports, documents, and ebooks published in Apple’s iBookstore. The partnership, which was announced earlier this week, coincides with the Department of Justice’s latest legal filings in its anti-trust suit against Apple.
The deal with the Government Printing Office (GPO) will make a wide swath of documents and ebooks available through the iBookstore. While some government documents are available for free, a number of documents and full-length ebooks are not.
The first week of college is filled with a bunch of crazy new things you have to adapt to if you want to make it out alive. Co-ed dorms. People with bad facial hair. Faux-Intellectuals. Scantly clad women. Demented professors. Weird cultish groups called fraternities. The absence of personal hygiene. And most importantly, the astronomical prices of textbooks.
Why have we had a congressional hearing on steroid use in baseball, but not a peep about college textbook prices? We thought that the iPad and eBooks were supposed to make education a whole lot cheaper, but most college students still buy physical textbooks. Here at Cult of Mac, for back to school season, we wanted to find out what’s cheaper: buying an iPad and only buying eTextbooks or going the traditional route and buying forty or fifty pounds worth of dead paper every semester.
Which is better for the penny-pinching student? The results are pretty surprising.
During its education event in January, Apple unveiled its plans to revolutionize the K-12 classroom with the iPad, electronic textbooks, a revamped version of iTunes U that supports content for K-12 schools as well as higher education, and tools for educators to create their own digital content using iBooks Author and iTunes U.
In the intervening months, schools and districts around the country have made significant investments in iPads, including the San Diego Unified School District, which invested $15 million in 26,000 iPads for its students. Those sales created a record quarter for Apple in the K-12 education market.
With the back to school season upon us, it’s clear that the massive iPad deployments will give Apple the opportunity to disrupt the classroom in the ways it has whole industries and, in many ways, that’s a good thing.
You need to read more. It’s just a fact. Everyone could stand to read a few more books a year and watch a few less GIFs on the internet. Isn’t that why you bought your iPad? Because you said you’d read more if you had an “eReader”? No? Well you should anyway.
To inject your life with more literature you’ll need to buy a lot of books. They’re not cheap, and they kind of suck to buy because, depending on which digital store you buy them from, they’re laden with DRM. Don’t let that get you down though because there’s some really great news today on the eBook front. Storybundle.com just launched their cool new website, and it’s pretty much the neatest thing to happen to eBooks this year.
Amazon is now selling more electronic books than all paper books combined – in the UK at least. The Kindle went on sale in Blighty just two years ago, and now “Amazon.co.uk customers are now purchasing more Kindle books than all printed books – hardcover and paperback – combined,” says Amazon PR.
And of course the Kindle itself is far from the whole story. The Kindle’s presence on pretty much every device ever, including the iPhone and iPad, makes the Kindle store a much more compelling place to buy books that the iBooks Store, whose offerings will only work on Apple devices. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s trivially easy to strip the DRM from Kindle books, making people like me a lot happier buying them.
The TED organization, which sponsors a range of conferences and talks on cutting edge topics recently launched an ebook series known as TED Books. Like the non-profit’s other initiatives, TED Books are “designed to spread great ideas.” Sticking to that ideal, the organization is making the ebooks, which will be released every two weeks, available across a range of ebook platforms including the new TED Books app for iOS devices.
The move highlights one of the challenges about ebooks – the choice of merchant and platform. That’s a particular concern when it comes to Apple’s iBookstore because purchases can only be read on an iOS device.
Book fetishists often cite the smell and feel of a book as a reason to keep chopping down trees and wasting fuel to ship the pulp around the world. But what about something that we probably all value, whether we are paper-sniffers or we have entered the modern age – signed books? Specifically, how does one get a digital book signed by the author?
Brett Kelly has the answer.
The Wall Street Journal today has a report on how the e-book industry is paying close attention not only to what books people read, but how they are reading them. Do readers skim the intro, skip around in the chapters? Do they read straight through? What are readers’ favorite passage to highlight and share? This kind of data mining is happening now, even on your iPad.
Should we be worried?
Erica Sadun writes at TUAW about a new, possibly first of its kind ebook, one that includes American Sign Language (ASL) videos embedded along with the electronic text and pictures.
While bilingual education has been around for a good long while, the concept of prepackaged ASL translation is a relatively new one, as the tools to embed quality video in an eBook haven’t been mainstream enough. Until now, of course, with iBooks, the iPad, and iBooks Author.
Author Adam Stone released his new book, Pointy Three, on the iBooks store last week. From the iTunes description:
Presented in American Sign Language (ASL) and English! The story of a fork who’s missing one of his prongs, but not his brave spirit. Follow Pointy Three on his journey through the land of Dinnertime as he meets characters left and right and looks for a place where he belongs.
Sadun interviews Stone and talks with him about his motivation to do such a book. “I want to show everybody that it can be done easily, quickly, and cheaply,” he said on his blog. “You don’t need to talk to a publisher; you are the publisher.”
Stone works as a first grade teacher at an ASL school in New York. He was inspired by the introduction of iBooks Author and came up with the idea for the story with ASL elements on the way home one day. He typed up the treatment on his iPhone in the Notes app, he says.
When asked why he hadn’t created an app, Stone reveals that he has no skills as a programmer. With iBooks Author, anyone can create an interactive story for their unique audience and situation.
This is the disruptive success of Apple, one that hearkens back to the original computer club and Steve Wozniak. Apple devices are all about empowering people to actually create and do things – wonderful and unique things – with the powerful technologies inside.
Source: The Unofficial Apple Weblog
A US judge today set a trial date for the US government’s lawsuit that accuses Apple and book publishers of conspiracy to fix the price of e-books. The case will begin June 3, 2013 and is based in part on antitrust charges, with the US Justice Department claiming that Apple colluded with five book publishers to artificially inflate electronic book prices in early 2010, when Apple was releasing the iPad.
