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Little delights: Pinching a page in iBooks Author
Delighting and surprising are hallmarks of the Apple user experience. Imagine my response then when today, while working in iBooks Author, I discovered than in iBooks 2, I could pinch a landscape page and it would jump me to the table-of-contents view. Steve and I are converting our Pitch Perfect book into iBooks Author format. That means we have to jump between presentations and orientations quite a lot to make sure each page layout works properly. Discovering this one simple trick transformed a repetitive task into one that was just a little bit simpler, a little less onerous. It put a smile on our faces and once again reminded us how much pleasure can be found in fine design details. What are some tiny interaction options that have surprised you in iOS? Share them in the comments.
Erica Sadun05.10.2012
You're the Pundit: Could Apple introduce iBooks Author print-on-demand?
When it comes to evaluating the next big thing, we turn to our secret weapon: the TUAW braintrust. We put the question to you and let you have your go at it. Today's topic is print-on-demand. Everybody's doing it. Amazon does it. Lulu does it. Even Apple does it -- so long as what you're printing is a photo book. So why haven't we heard a peep about iBooks Author (iBA) print-on-demand? Wouldn't it be nearly as easy to produce an iBA project as a photo one? So what's the hold up? We think that iBooks Author offers a perfect opportunity for Apple to extend its already excellent POD services to a new group of customers. They could easily extend their current meant-for-iBooks templates to a variety of more printer-friendly options. Sure they'd have to change the pricing model, add more pages, allow black & white printing, and implement other changes that reflected the difference between heirloom photo collections and a standard print book. We get that, along with the big set-up overhead that would be involved. But think of how awesome it might be. So why have we heard not a whispered rumor? Is this a no-go area for Apple? You tell us. Place your vote in this poll and then join in the comments with all your analysis. %Poll-75111%
Erica Sadun05.08.2012
You're Our Editor: iBooks Author or ePub for the iBooks store?
Normally we turn to the TUAW Brain Trust for your opinions about hot topics in the news and your predictions about the future of tech. Today, we're switching things up. Instead of asking about where things are going, we're asking you about strategy. Here's the situation: Like many authors, TUAW blogger Steve Sande and I have fallen in love with Apple's iBooks Author page layout tool. When writing our book about preparing your computer for the upcoming 10.8 OS X upgrade, we decided to create an iBA version for iBooks and a standard Kindle edition for Amazon. Although frustrating to use at times (it's still early days in iBooks-ville, such as where's the "Split into new chapter at this point" option?), we loved the look and feel of what iBooks Author produced. It's slick, it's hot, it's yummy. We uploaded our product last week using the nifty in-app "Publish to iBooks" feature. Then people started asking us: "What about us iPhone users? Don't we get to read the book too?" You see, here's the problem: iBooks Author doesn't do iPhone. It's an iPad-only product. And there is the heart of our dilemma. Should we invest the time, the extra ISBN, and the extremely high annoyance overhead to convert our Kindle version to an iBooks-compliant ePUB via our old creaky copies of Pages? (We mean it about the annoyance. It's a huge pain.) You tell us. We're going to go with your advice. We're giving you a poll and the comments are open for your opinion. Should ebook authors make an end-run around iBooks Author to create iPhone-compatible ePUBs that reach a wider audience or are we wasting time and effort on a format that can never really compare to the iPad experience? %Poll-75089%
Erica Sadun05.06.2012
iBook Lessons: Creating Amazon KDP tables of contents on MS Word for Macintosh
For whatever reason, many Amazon authors seem to be under the impression that you can only create a proper table of contents for Kindle Direct Publishing on Windows, not the Mac. Having just uploaded our newest book (Getting Ready for Mountain Lion) to Amazon, Steve Sande and I have invested a lot of time learning the quirks of KDP and its tools, as well as those for iBooks (but more about that in another post). For any of our readers who are also budding authors or publishers, we'll be sharing what we've learned in a TUAW series called "iBook Lessons." We thought we'd share our KDP Table of Contents strategy with you to help reduce the hair-pulling and frustration associated with document preparation. Here are the steps we use in Microsoft Word 2008 and 2011 to create our TOC. Create a fresh page and add Table of Contents text line, formatted with your favorite header style. Move your cursor just to the left of "Table". Choose Insert > Bookmark. Call the bookmark toc and click Add. This creates a bookmark before the title, named in such a way that KDP's automatic conversion tools will recognize it as the start of your Table of Contents. All the Kindle hardware and apps will be able to use it as well. Generate a temporary TOC, so you have an outline to start working with. Move to under your Table of Contents header to a new line. Choose Insert > Index and Tables > Table of Contents. Uncheck "Show Page Numbers". Click Options. Choose which heading styles you wish to include. If you use custom styles (e.g. H1 instead of Header 1) make sure to add a level for those as well. Typically, most ebook TOCs use either just H1 or H1 and H2. Your call. Click OK to finish options. Click OK again to generate the contents. Select the entire TOC, cut it, and paste it into TextEdit to be your guide to the next step. For each entry in the TOC, locate the start of that section in your manuscript. Set your cursor to the left of each section title. Again, use Insert > Bookmark to create a bookmark at that position. Name each item with a meaningful (and easy-to-recognize) tag. After bookmarking your entire document, return to the initial Table of Contents section. Paste the text from TextEdit back into your document as simple, unlinked text. For each item on your list, select the entire line: i.e. every word, not just clicking to the left of the name as you did to set bookmarks. Then choose Insert > Hyperlink (Command-K). Choose the Document tab, and click the Locate button to the right of the Anchor text field. Choose the bookmark you wish to link to, and click OK. Repeat for the remaining TOC entries. Once you've finished adding bookmarks and hyperlinks, save your work. Go to KDP and upload the file (you may want to create a testbed skeleton book entry just for this purpose). Download the .mobi file it generates and try it out on the Kindle Mac app and/or any Kindles or iPads/iPhones you have on-hand. Amazon's Kindle Previewer app is also available for download from KDP, and provides simulated views of your ebook on iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Kindle DX, and Kindle Fire. Always make sure you test each link to ensure that the bookmarks are placed properly. Also test the Table of Contents button in-app and check that it jumps you to the TOC correctly. Best of luck in your ebook / iBook publishing efforts, and look forward to more tips about publishing here on TUAW.
Erica Sadun05.05.2012
FoxTrot author creates "Pad Packs" with iBooks Author
FoxTrot creator Bill Amend packaged his beloved comic strip for the iPad using Apple's free iBooks Author publishing tool. Amend released these iPad mini-books recently and calls them the "FoxTrot Pad Pack". Each Pad Pack is US$1.99 and contains a mixture of 100 strips curated from the 24-year-old comic strip series. Amend has three Pad Packs in iTunes and hopes to add a new one every few months. He also plans to bring the series to the Kindle, Nook and Android tablets. [Via Daring Fireball]
Kelly Hodgkins04.17.2012
Panotour Pro creates iBooks-embeddable digital tours
On the heels of iBooks Author's introduction last month, we're starting to see tools emerge that support the creation of specialized embeddable widgets. The video that follows showcases Panotour Pro's virtual 3D tours, which can be exported to widget form and then included into your iBooks project. Although we haven't been able to try the technology out yet ourselves, we think interactive tour widgets will provide a great feature for many titles such as travel books, how-to presentations (think laying out a kitchen for a design book), and so forth. Panotour Pro costs 299 euros (357.60 euros with taxes). Thanks, Niels Vanspauwen
Erica Sadun02.29.2012
iBookstore adds screenshots, promo codes, and more for publishers
iTunes Connect has sent out a letter to content publishers detailing some changes and improvements to the iBookstore. Just like the App Store, the iBookstore now allows publishers to issue promo codes for content sold on the store -- up to 50 free codes distributable to book reviewers. Publishers can also submit screenshots of the book, which will be particularly useful for multimedia content produced via iBooks Author. Just like screenshots for the App Store, Apple is very specific on what formats it will accept: 1024 x 768 or 768 x 1024 pictures in the RGB color space, formatted as .jpeg, .jpg, or .png. The iBookstore has altered the way it handles pre-orders for content. Now publishers are able to make content available for pre-order without submitting a book cover or any other assets until up to two weeks prior to publication. Covers, book assets, and custom previews must be submitted two weeks prior to publication. The addition of promo codes and screenshots brings iBookstore content more in line with the offerings on the App Store and will no doubt be extremely useful tools to publishers of all sizes, from the biggest publishing houses down to budding self-publishers.
Chris Rawson02.15.2012
Diesel Sweeties turns iBooks Author experiment into successful Kickstarter
A couple weeks ago, Richard Stevens decided to create a free ebook of with a month's worth of his webcomic series, Diesel Sweeties, using iBooks Author. We reported on the experiment then, but Stevens recently disclosed just how big of a success it was: More than 10,000 downloads in three days of the iPad book. Stevens has propelled that success into a Kickstarter campaign, where he will distribute his entire series to date for free in two forms: a PDF ebook and an iBook that will be more than 3,000 pages long. Stevens said he would be making the two versions simultaneously in iBooks Author and Adobe InDesign. Looking to raise $3,000 initially, Stevens already has raised nearly $17,000 with less than 27 days remaining in his campaign. I figured it wouldn't take long to see iBooks Author help drive a project such as this to a success, but I am surprised to see that it's happened within a month of the program's release. It'll be great to see final ebook, and I hope that iBooks Author can manage a project size that big!
Megan Lavey-Heaton02.10.2012
iBooks Author gets new EULA, aims to clear writer's block
We've waxed lyrical about iBooks Author at the technological level, but a good self-publishing platform counts for nothing if authors are put off by its terms and conditions. A particular source of antagonism so far has been the notion that, if an author decides to charge a fee for their iBook, then Apple will claim exclusive distribution rights and prevent them from publishing their work anywhere else. Check out the More Coverage links below and you'll see that a number of writers tore up Apple's licensing agreement and flung it into the proverbial overflowing trash can. Now though, Cupertino has done some re-writing of its own and come up with a new EULA. It clarifies that Apple will only demand exclusive distribution rights over .ibooks files that are created with iBooks Author, rather than the book's content itself. It states that "this restriction will not apply to the content of the work when distributed in [another] form." So, there it is -- writers everywhere can happily go back to tearing up their own work again.
Sharif Sakr02.06.2012
iBooks Author 1.01 out with updated EULA
An incremental release for iBooks Author has been released with changes to the program's EULA. The update is 143.50 MB, which seems pretty hefty for a EULA change. The change is an important one though, clarifying that Apple has rights over the format a book is in, not the content. If someone wants to charge a fee for an .ibooks formatted file, that document can only be sold or distributed through Apple, and that work will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple. The restriction does not include works distributed in non-.ibooks formats (such as the Kindle), as TUAW's Erica Sadun previously discussed.
Megan Lavey-Heaton02.03.2012
iBooks Author Challenge: Adding spelling quizzes to iBooks
Dave Caolo and I were chatting this morning about iBooks and spelling. "It's not my daughter's favorite subject," he said, "and I'm looking for a way to make it more appealing to her." He asked if there could there be any way to incorporate spelling quizzes into iBooks via Author. The answer is, unfortunately, not clearly yes. That's because iBooks Author assumes that all interaction will be by multiple choice. That means you can create interactions to choose from common misspellings and from homonyms, but can't solicit freeform text entry. That gives rise to the kind of interaction you see below. The shortcomings are apparent. For example, you cannot define any item that isn't tied to a specific location (so you can't create a pool of misspellings without destinations). If the reader switches the order of the two misspelled words (here Tale and Flour) those are marked wrong as well. So I hopped into Dashcode and built a widget that would solicit a correctly spelled word and embedded it into an Author project as follows. This turned out to be a failure. Although the embedded audio prompt worked fine (albeit in a separate interactive element), widgets do not run in-line and iBook's interpretation of the widget hid my embedded checker button. This might be due to my subpar Widget construction, or I may simply be running into iBooks 2 limitations. So how can you expand iBooks for spelling? This post tells you where I am to date. If you have a better solution, drop a note into the comments. And if you are an expert Dashboard widget engineer, please ping me offline. I'd really love to test out the possibilities and limitations of this tech.
Erica Sadun02.03.2012
Switched On: You tell me it's the institution
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Apple rose to dominate sales of digital music by more or less mirroring the way consumers acquired music in the physical world -- that is, purchasing songs, but providing a greater degree of granularity. This worked well for music and has also held true for apps and best-selling books, but hasn't been as in step with consumer media acquisition habits for other content.For example, before Apple brought sales of video material to iTunes, most consumers did not generally own TV shows except for perhaps a few cherished series on DVD. They either watched them as they aired as part of a cable-like subscription or paid a flat monthly fee for the privilege of recording them on a DVR to be viewed after they aired. Furthermore, both Blockbuster physical stores and later Netflix's DVD by mail feature relied on a system of one-time consumption via rental or subscription that eschewed ownership of movies. And today, Vevo.com offers free streaming of many music videos that Apple still seeks to sell.
Ross Rubin01.29.2012Using iBooks Author to produce a comic
When iBooks Author was released last week, I saw the potential for using it to port the webcomic I co-create to the iPad to go along with our upcoming print edition. I'm not alone, as Richard Stevens of Diesel Sweeties immediately took the chance to test iBooks Author by creating an ebook with the most recent month's worth of comics. Stevens is offering the ebook through his website via Dropbox rather than through the main iBooks store, so those who want to test it out will need to manually sync it over, email it to themselves on the iPad or use an app such as Dropbox to add it on the iPad. Stevens said he would love to eventually get a collection to readers that's searchable, sortable by character and major storyline and more. For my own comic, I'd love to add in some of the historical information on the characters, the fairy tales used, etc. iBooks Author is a step toward making these sorts of interactive comics available, and it'll be create to see how other comics creators can bend iBooks Author to their will. [Via Macstories]
Megan Lavey-Heaton01.25.2012
iBooks Author sees 600,000 initial downloads, 3 million for iTunes U app
Apple announced on its quarterly earnings call this afternoon that iBooks Author had seen 600,000 downloads since its unveiling last week. The folks in Cupertino also mentioned that iTunes U has seen 3 million app downloads, feeling a bump from the announcement a few days ago. One other interesting tidbit: currently, 1.5 million iPads have been deployed in schools. We'd surmise that those numbers will continue to increase as iBooks 2 and iBook Author start to pound the pavement in the months ahead.
Billy Steele01.24.2012
iBooks Author owns your format, not your content
There's been a lot of heat and fury surrounding the iBooks Author terms and conditions ever since the service was introduced last week. To boil the controversy down to basics, Apple has introduced a private protocol extension that takes EPUB to the next generation. And then they created a business model that uses this proprietary technology to monetize commercial transactions. This runs right in line with my predictions from earlier this month. This decision, to build a proprietary format on an open standard, has led to a lively debate about whether a member of an open standards organization should be creating private standards like the .ibooks format or AirPlay. And, to be fair to Apple, to even realize that this proprietary format is based on an open standard, you actually have to crack open the files and expose the EPUB underpinnings. Apple wasn't exactly announcing how they did things last week at the educational media event. From a tech point of view, the .ibooks format itself is exciting stuff. It takes a major step forward, blending HTML 5 tech directly into ebooks and unifying books with the complete iWorks suite. A few weeks ago, I wrote that "I believe that Apple should be leading a revolution in embedded live book elements with video, programmable app and web integration, and more (Think "Khan Academy" as books, for example). Why aren't we seeing both the specs and the tools with Apple trailblazing forward?" Today, that reality is here, with iBooks Author. I know several people who are already using the Khan Academy material. And because Apple moves the format forward so much from the open standard it was based upon, developers should have no issues with Apple making the updated version private. If you thought Dashcode was an optional Xcode extra not worthy of notice, now's a great time to reassess. At the risk of being hit with rotten vegetables, the "sweet solution" of 2007 has now come into its own: 1960's? Plastic. 2010's? HTML 5. With smart coding, you can embed entire applications into iBooks. Scarily accomplished developer Steven Troughton-Smith recently managed to embed a playable version of his classic iOS app Lights Off inside an iBooks book using a Dashcode widget written with HTML 5. "This is the first time Dashboard widgets have worked on iOS," he points out. What's more, he tells me that some developers have gotten the WebOS app framework (Enyo) and Cappucino to run inside their books. In terms of creative expression, this is a huge development with nearly limitless possibilities. Troughton-Smith said, "It will be absolutely epic for designers and developers making portfolios, or perhaps a book that reviews apps and contains mini versions, or whatever." So yes, Apple intends to control the sole paid delivery portal for this technology, freely offering the tool to create new .ibooks files, taking a 30% cut of all commercial material developed using this specification. At the same time, they're the ones who are developing both the authoring tools and the distribution apps on their own nickel. I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that I believe that Apple is moving forward in a smart and well-calculated fashion. While Amazon's KDP Select program created exclusivity due to legal agreements and shared profits, Apple is building its own kind of proprietary author cadre based on new and forward-looking technology. Absolutely no one will be forced to use the new .ibooks format or the tools that create those files. If you wish to publish a non-exclusive EPUB on the iBooks store as well as on Amazon, Nook, etc, you are welcome to do so. Nor do I personally think that Apple will come after anyone who shares material between .ibooks editions and EPUB ones. I am, obviously not a lawyer, but I believe Apple is protecting and charging for use of its format, not aggressively seizing content. On the whole, I have been deeply pleased with nearly everything I have discovered in iBooks -- from its media support to its strong accessibility extensions. I don't know about you, but I'm getting ready to brush up on my Javascript skills. If you're an app dev, you probably will want to as well. [Update February 3rd 2012: Apple's terms and conditions now clarify "If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple. This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format."]
Erica Sadun01.24.2012
Daily Update for January 23, 2012
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen.
Steve Sande01.23.2012
Estimated 350,000 iBooks textbooks downloaded in three days
Apple's textbook endeavor may be off to a better start than anyone expected. According to Global Equities Research, a firm that tracks iBook sales, iTunes customers downloaded over 350,000 textbooks in the first three days of availability. The system also logged 90,000 downloads of iBooks Author, despite lingering questions about licensing and ownership rights of the resulting work. Apple iBooks Author opens a new world of publishing for the education market. As pointed out by Steve Sande in his review of the authoring tool, iBooks Author is designed to help writers produce textbooks. Usually a market reserved for prominent publishers, the tool could open the door for smaller publishers to distribute books or even individual teachers to produce customized content for their students. As someone who homeschool their children, I'm excited to see if curriculum companies embrace this technology. I'm already using the iPad about 30 percent of the time, and would love to use it more often.
Kelly Hodgkins01.23.2012
iBooks Author: An ebook publisher looks at Apple's textbook creation app
TUAW's Erica Sadun and I are ebook publishers. Late last year, we started up an ebook publishing company -- Sand Dune Books -- and were fortunate to hit a publishing home run right off the bat with our book "Talking to Siri." Since we're familiar with the tools used to create documents for publishing on both the Amazon Kindle bookstore and iBookstore, we were both curious to see what Apple was going to announce on Thursday. The free creation tool, iBooks Author, wasn't a surprise to us, and now that I've had an opportunity to work with the app I thought I'd pass along my thoughts on how it works and why it may not be the publishing tool for everyone. Creating a new book As with Apple's iWork suite, launching iBooks Author initially displays a set of templates that authors and publishers can use right out of the box to create attractively formatted ebooks. That being said, there are only six templates available. Apple's emphasis for iBooks Author is to create a vast library of low-cost textbooks, hence the six templates are all textbook-oriented. For authors who are more interested in publishing other types of fiction or non-fiction books, these six templates can be repurposed. After making changes to a template, the custom template can be saved for future use. Anyone who is familiar with Pages will have few problems working with iBooks Author. The two apps are similar in many ways, with the addition of layout-specific tools. There are widgets -- familiar to users of Apple's ill-fated iWeb -- that add special functions to ebooks. Those functions include interactive galleries, sound or video media, Keynote presentations, interactive review quizzes, interactive images, 3D rotatable images, and HTML code. For each template, there is a very complete set of paragraph, character and list styles that can be applied to text with a click. New styles can be generated and added to the template as well. In addition, there are a number of page layouts available. The layouts include Chapters, Sections, copyright, dedication, and forward pages, blank pages, and 1 through 3 column pages. Placeholders appear on each layout, and with a click you can replace the boilerplate with your own text or images. Like the iWorks apps, iBooks Author has excellent integration with iTunes, iPhoto, and GarageBand for importing media into your project. Text can be wrapped around the images, and frames, masks, and shadows applied to the images to give them depth on a page. I love the glossary tools that are built into iBooks Author. It's easy to highlight a term, define it as a glossary entry, and then write a definition for the term. The term becomes a link that the reader can click on to see the definition. iBooks Author lets you toggle between portrait and landscape orientations to see what the end product is going to look like on an iPad. There's also a tethered preview feature that moves the book to your iPad for on-device previewing of text, graphics, and the special features. Speaking of those special features, the included widgets are all rather handy for textbook authors. The review widget can be used to create useful quizzes. There are four different styles of multiple choice questions, and two where the students need to move a label or image to the appropriate location. The gallery widget lets authors add galleries of photos pertaining to a subject. In the image below, I've created a gallery showing three of the Apple executives. Users can swipe through the images. One of the other widgets that could end up being quite useful is the HTML widget. I used this extensively to work around some of iWeb's missing features, and was able to add web forms, online stores, and other items to websites. Can you imagine being able to put an open-book exam into a textbook, allowing students to take the exam through the book with the results going to an online database? Cool. Authors can also embed fully-functioning Keynote presentations and movies into their books. All of this content can be previewed by opening iBooks 2 on the iPad and then connecting the device to a Mac running iBooks Author. If changes are made to the ebook in iBooks Author, you need to click the preview button in the app one more time to refresh the changes; it doesn't happen automatically. iBooks Author follows a familiar format for textbooks, with chapters, sections, and pages. It adds commonly used pages like dedications and copyright info, and when these pages are inserted into an iBook using the tool, it automatically adds them to the table of contents. If I have one complaint about iBooks Author, it's that it doesn't really lend itself too well to collaborations. It would be nice if two authors could both work on a single document at the same time. Instead, the document needs to be "checked out" to the appropriate parties, one at a time. Publishing For publishers who are thinking about putting their ebooks into both the iBookstore and the Amazon Kindle Bookstore, iBooks Author throws a monkey wrench into the works. iBooks Author's book format is specific to iBooks 2; you can't directly republish your book to work in the Kindle Bookstore. That's not really too different from the way things were before iBooks Author came out. For ebooks that Erica and I have published through Sand Dune Books, we wrote the original books in Microsoft Word. When publishing to the Kindle Bookstore, we simply uploaded the file to Kindle Direct Publishing and the .docx file was converted to work in the Kindle Reader. To publish to the iBookstore, we imported the Word document into Pages, made formatting changes where necessary, and then exported the book as an EPUB. Some additional work was required in Calibre to get the book into shape for the iBookstore. I won't go through the steps required to get a book published on the Kindle Bookstore, but note that it is much easier than getting a book into the iBookstore. For that, you need to have an iBookstore seller account, have a copy of iTunes Producer to take the iTunes Store package created by iBooks Author and publish it into the iBookstore, and have an active contract. You also need to have a bank account set up to receive proceeds through electronic payment, an ISBN for each title, and a US tax ID. Apple is now requiring authors to create a sample book that customers can download and view for free. This is a new requirement that's part of the publishing process. If you decide that you don't want to publish your book through the iBookstore, you can export the book in iBooks or PDF format for self-distribution. As you have probably already heard, Apple surprised authors in the iBooks Author License Agreement. The wording that caught everyone off guard was in section 2 of the agreement: B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows: (i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means; (ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution. It appears from reading this that if you wish to sell your iBooks Author-created tome through the iBookstore, then you cannot sell it through any other bookstore -- including the Amazon Kindle Bookstore. Quite a few web notables have decried this, but Amazon is also pulling stunts to try to keep publishers from putting their work into other bookstores. A good example of this is the Kindle Select program, in which authors who agree to keep their works specific to the Kindle bookstore can have their books distributed through the Kindle Lending Library program. With this program, Amazon Prime customers can borrow the books at no cost, and the author still gets paid a token amount (in December, 2011, each borrow was worth $1.70). So what's an author or publisher to do if he or she wants to have distribution in both the Kindle Bookstore and the iBookstore? Easy -- you just don't use iBooks Author to create the book. This means that your iBooks won't be able to have many of the nifty features that iBooks Author allows you to use, but you will be able to distribute your work for a fee in any ebook store. I think a lot of non-authors and publishers are whining about the iBooks Author License Agreement, when they really don't understand that it's just saying that you can't sell works created with iBooks Author in any bookstore. You can create ebooks using other methods and sell them anywhere. Conclusion Let me reiterate one key point: iBooks Author is designed for creating textbooks. If you're thinking about using it for other types of books, you can -- but understand that this app may not necessarily be the tool you're looking for if you want to create and sell books on all ebook platforms. iBooks Author does a great job at what it's designed for, and I think we'll see a lot of incredibly interactive books hitting the iBookstore in the near future. Is it perfect? No. But for a first release of a new app, it's pretty darned close.
Steve Sande01.23.2012
Report: Apple sees 350,000 textbook downloads within three days after iBooks 2 debut
Apple has yet to release any official numbers, but early returns on its new iBooks textbook store are looking pretty promising. According to Global Equities Research, more than 350,000 textbooks were downloaded within three days of the store's debut, along with some 90,000 downloads of the iBooks Author platform. As All Things D explains, Global Equities Research used a proprietary system to compile these numbers and hasn't revealed much about its methodology, but its figures, if accurate, would certainly mark an auspicious beginning to Cupertino's latest "reinvention."
Amar Toor01.23.2012Daily Update for January 19, 2012
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen.
Steve Sande01.19.2012