In what I suspect will be an increasing trend, cartoonist Bill Amend has released three “packs” of his popular FoxTrot comics for the iPad. He built the books by himself using iBooks Author and proceeds go to the Help Bill Amend Eat Food Fund (I suspect).
He’s selling three titles including a special issue — number 3.14 — featuring geek strips. Each book contains 100 strips and is optimized for the new iPad. → Read More
As I watched Apple’s iBooks event in New York City last week, my mind began to race about the ramifications of such announcements. Everyone had a pretty good idea for weeks (or months if you read the Steve Jobs biography) that textbooks would be a focal point for Apple, but there wasn’t much thought given to what this would mean. During the event itself, I just kept thinking, “wow, Apple just incentivized every college student to get an iPad”.
Except, they didn’t. Not yet. → Read More
With the shift from print books to digital books come a few nasty side effects. Sure, it’s much easier much easier to acquire and read books when you don’t even have to get out of your chair, but those digital copies can be cracked and disseminated for free with only a little more effort.
As ebook sales expand, so does ebook piracy, so I have to wonder if Apple’s concerted efforts in creating a new kind of iBook experience will open them up to unwanted attention from digital pirates. → Read More
Apple is making a play for the textbook market with its launch today of iBooks 2 and the new textbooks within that app. It’s Apple, so they are going to reinvent the textbook industry, right?
Well, maybe not today. If you fire up your iPad and update to the latest version of iBooks (Apple’s app for books with its own store separate from iTunes), you can check out all of the new textbooks Apple just introduced. All 8 of them. That’s right, there are only 8 textbooks available in the new format. → Read More
Today at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Apple held an event to talk about two key things: “Reinventing textbooks” and “Reinventing curriculum”. But perhaps lost amid the tentpole announcements (iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and the all-new iTunes U) were some subtleties of those products and Apple’s plans for the education space.
Among them: → Read More
I do not want my children learning math proofs on iPads. I simply do not see the value in it. iPads will not help with identifying sentence clauses or writing an essay. There’s a place for interactive learning and there’s not. It’s a clear line. Give science and history teachers iPads loaded with demos, videos and soundbites. Allow children to pinch and zoom DNA strands and the inner workings of WWI trenches. But make my kids do math drills on paper with a dull pencil. Please.
Simply put, the movement to digitalized learning scares me. iBooks 2 is just the start. Digital interactive learning has always been the future but I fear for my children now that it’s here. → Read More
Following this morning’s education event, Apple has launched a new, dedicated iOS application called “iTunes U.” This educational content portal, previously available only in iTunes, has now arrived in the App Store for all iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch devices. It has also undergone a major revamp so as to better complement Apple’s newly-announced educational offerings, including iBooks 2 and its iBooks Author Tool, which allows anyone to easily create books and textbooks.
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Today at Apple’s education event, the company introduced iBooks 2, a textbook platform that effectively transforms $200 textbooks into iPad apps at a much more reasonable price. But of course, a textbook platform isn’t worth a thing without the educational powerhouse publishers behind it.
Luckily, the first up to the bat on the iBooks 2 platform are names we know well: Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. They’re responsible for 90 percent of the textbooks sold. → Read More
Apple has spent the past few moments demoing all the new education-friendly featured in iBooks 2, but they have just now answered the question of how authors can create that kind of rich content. All the magic happens in a new OSX application called iBooks Author, which gives users a simple way to integrate different types of media in order to create iBooks of any stripe.
→ Read More
The days of the $500 college textbook bills are, it seems, over. With Apple’s announcement of iBooks 2, the world of textbooks is changed forever.
Education is a hard nut to crack. There are bright spots and clever new ideas, but technology hasn’t quite figured out how to do a better job than the “old ways.” That’s why Apple’s decision to launch iBooks 2 and the attendant editing tools is so important: it tears down a number of entrenched technologies while maintaining the scaffolding of familiarity. It leaves the stuff that works and saves the schools, students, and parents money and time.
In short, it stabs the publishing industry while it embraces it, ensuring that its old methods are no longer profitable but offering it new tools to go forward. Whether they survive the initial thrust, though, is anyone’s guess.
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At Apple’s education event today, the company revealed a number of compelling stats regarding iPad use in the education and learning space. Apple’s SVP of Marketing Phil Schiller announced that there are currently 20,000 education and learning applications that have been built for the iPad.
He added that 1.5 million iPads are currently in use in educational institutions and schools. Obviously, Apple is looking to increase this number, which is why the company is partnering with publishing houses and innovating on iBooks to offer more a more student-focused and education-friendly experience.
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“Education is deep in our DNA, and it has been since the very beginning,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing. On that thought Apple just announced iBooks 2.
This move is centered around reinvent the textbook. Schiller explained today that Apple sees textbooks as amazing devices, but they’re heavy, not searchable or durable. According to Apple the iPad is the perfect counter. It’s portable, durable, interactive, searchable, current and capable of containing even richer content. → Read More
A publisher, John T. Colby, bought a series of old titles and sold under the name iBooks in since 1999. Around the same time, Apple sold laptops under the iBook name and, more important, began its iBook store in 2010. Colby is stating that Apple has essentially destroyed his business and that:
“Apple’s use of the mark ‘iBooks’ to denote the electronic library that can be accessed via its iPad tablet computer and its iPhone is likely to overwhelm the good will of plaintiffs’ ‘ibooks’ and ‘ipicturebooks’ marks and render them virtually worthless.”
In what they’re calling a throwback to the original comic book they released to announce the launch of Chrome, Google has today unveiled a new site meant to educate users about browsers and the web. 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web is actually an interactive web app meant to look like a children’s book. And while the book’s content is all about web technology, the interactive book itself shows off some of that technology as it’s built entirely in HTML5. And it’s very slick.
In fact, it looks a lot like an Apple iBook — the book platform that Apple created for the iPad. It has a nice and clickable table of contents, a quick-jump area along the bottom, and if you hover over the corner of a page, it will even curl (clicking on the curl will turn the page). But again, all of this is done with HTML5. → Read More
Buying a digital book for your iPad is a very odd experience. If you fire up iTunes, you can find music, movies, apps, even audiobooks, but there is no category for digital books. You need to first download the iBooks app, and then buy books within that app. So it is like a marketplace within a marketplace that also happens to be a reader. The Kindle app also works that way. It is confusing.
But if you go into the App Store, you can find a whole category of iPad apps which are books. Many of them are interactive and tend to be children’s books like Green Eggs And Ham ($3.99) or Miss Spider’s Tea Party ($7.99). Increasingly, more and more books will end up in the App Store for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is simply because apps are more interesting. → Read More
Books are becoming electronic like every other form of print media, but they still lag in their social skills. A startup called Rethink Books wants to incorporate sharing features into every electronic book and turn them into social books. I caught up with founders Jason Ilian and Jason Johnson today at the TedxEast conference in New York City, where they presented a demo f their yet-to-be-released product. I caught up with them in the hallway and got a quick demo which I captured on video.
What CEO Ilian is showing is an iPad app, but this app could work on other devices, including e-readers. You see the familiar bookshelf with your books, but you can also connect with your friends on Twitter and Facebook and within the Social Books app itself to see what books are on their bookshelves. As you read a book, you can highlight and create notes, as well as see the highlights and notes of your friends (in different colors). Excerpts could be shared via Twitter or Facebook with a link back to an excerpt page, along with a link to buy the book. There is an activity stream view, where you can see all the comments and recent reading activities of the people you follow. → Read More
Starting today, O’Reilly Media will be selling some 600 titles in Apple’s iBookstore, along with almost 150 more from (yes, ironically) Microsoft Press, whose books are sold and distributed by O’Reilly.
The iBookstore is of course included in the free iBooks app for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch (iTunes link). For now, the availability of O’Reilly and Microsoft Press titles is limited to the US and Canada, however. → Read More
If you’re comfortable traveling with your iPad (and why not?), these Lonely Planet guides look pretty amazing. Regular books seem like they’d be a pain on an iPad, but picture books for kids and interactive, picture- and link-rich content like travel guides are made for it. You can search, bookmark, leave notes, link out to maps and related websites. Wish I’d had all that with my Japan guide, which was like 700 pages long. Each guide costs $15 — not cheap, but reasonable. They have Italy, Ireland, the UK, Spain, and France, with, I’m sure, many more planned. → Read More
Doxie, the cute but functional little document scanner, just got an interesting update. Version 1.2 of the Doxie software adds a Devices tab which allows you to send scanned items to your iPhone or iPad. You can read those items on your iThingie using iBooks. This may make your iPad even more useful, and certainly opens new doors to productivity. → Read More
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