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Just in time for the holidays, iBooks Store adds the ability to send iBooks as gifts
Apple has just introduced a new way for you to buy gifts for friends and relatives. The iBooks Store has added the ability to give iBooks to those on your shopping list. It's been possible to send apps to others as gifts since 2010, and music or videos from the iTunes Store for many years. Buying those gifts is actually quite simple: When you find a book that you just have to give to someone as a present, click on the drop-down arrow next to the price (on OS X Mavericks machines with the iBooks app). On iOS devices, tap the Share button from the store page for the iBook and you'll be presented with a Gift Book option. In both versions of the iBooks Store, you're then provided with a place to enter the email address of the recipient(s), a personal message and a day that you want to send the gift -- up to 90 days away. Gifting iBooks is an easy way to introduce someone to the concept of electronic books if they're still clinging bitterly to their dead-tree editions, and it's all charged to whatever payment method you've set up for your Apple ID.
Vellum: Taking the pain out of e-book publishing
As someone who has gone through the fun of self-publishing e-books for use on everything from the Amazon Kindle to Apple's iBooks, I know what a pain in the neck it can be to get everything formatted and set up properly for publishing. Even Apple's iBooks Author has limitations once you've actually created your book, since you need to have a developer account and know how to use iTunes Connect to get everything uploaded. Vellum (free) is a new Mac app released today from 180g that turns book publishing into a pleasure instead of a chore. The company was founded by a pair of Brads -- Brad Andalman and Brad West -- last year. Before they made the leap to app development and electronic publishing, they worked at Pixar Animation Studios, both on the feature films and the animation software used to create those blockbuster movies. The idea with Vellum is to let people download the app for free, import their manuscript, play with styling and then view a preview that shows how their book will look when loaded onto certain e-readers. Once authors are happy with the e-book's appearance, they can send the preview to "beta readers" for feedback and last-chance editing. When the e-book is ready to go, the authors make an in-app purchase -- US$49.99 for one book, $99.99 for three books or $149.99 for five books -- to generate a file that's ready to be uploaded to the appropriate e-book store. That makes life a lot easier for author/publishers. Both Amazon and Apple have eliminated the requirement and expense to purchase an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for each title, at least for domestic publishing. You'll still need to get an account for the publishing portals -- iTunes Connect for iBooks and Amazon Author Central for Kindle books -- and know how to submit the e-books. Let's take a quick look at Vellum and how it works. To begin with, authors can write their manuscripts and save them in a Microsoft .docx format. Vellum opens the document, analyzes it to find where it thinks chapters are and then converts it to Vellum's native format. You can edit the documents in Vellum, so typos that have made it past previous editing can be corrected without the need to re-import the document. If you're starting from scratch, it's possible to create an entire book in Vellum without resorting to using another product. Before you go further, you might want to add front- and end-matter to the book, which is a cinch -- you just add an element, whether that's a copyright, dedication, foreword or any other standard publishing item. Once the contents are set, you get to select the style of the book. At this time, Vellum includes eight "themes" plus a number of choices for heading, first paragraph, block quotation, ornamental break and paragraph after break. They're all very nice and professional-looking styles, and it's possible to preview what the book is going to look like at any time just by clicking the preview button. If you don't like what you see in the preview (for iPhone, iPad, Kindle Paperwhite and Nook Simple Touch), it's easy to change what you're doing. There's a tool for adding a cover image by dragging and dropping it onto a specific spot, and your entire book can be previewed for white, black or sepia pages if the e-reader supports those. You can also see how the layout will appear if the reader changes the font or font size. When you're ready to test the book in e-reader software or on a specific device, you click the Generate button. Kindle publishing requires the free download of the "kindlegen" plugin, which Vellum thoughtfully provides an in-app link to. I generated the sample book for both Amazon (.mobi) and iBooks (.epub) formats, and was able to open both of the formatted files immediately in the native Mac apps. All in all, I found Vellum to be an amazingly robust app for a 1.0 version, and I look forward to giving it a workout in real life. If you're interested in trying it out, I recommend downloading the free app and giving it a try.
Emily Books launches iOS subscription app
Emily Books is an independent e-book publisher that runs its own e-bookstore with a special twist, offering readers a subscription model. For US$13.99 a month, or $159.99 a year, readers are provided with one e-book every month. If you pay all at once, you save around $7.89 a year. Now Emily Books is moving beyond the web and onto your iOS device with a new app, and it's bringing subscriptions with it. The app is called Emily Books Reader and it mixes the subscription model of its online service with the added content of a digital magazine. Emily Books focuses largely on the works of female authors, with special attention paid to memoirs and transgressive fiction. Emily Books Reader couples each month's subscription selection with essays that deal with the book's subject and a Q&A with the author. The iOS app subscription is cheaper than the online offering at $9.99 a month, or $99.99 for a whole year. However, unlike the online store, users cannot download a DRM-free EPUB or MOBI copy of the book. You're limited to reading strictly on your iOS device. Users who subscribe online are given free access to the iOS app. You can find the iOS app in the iTunes store.
Google Play Books lands in eight Asian countries, New Zealand
Turns out Google Play Books' arrival in India was merely the beginning of its burgeoning love affair with Asia. From the land of the Taj Mahal, it has made its way to eight new locations in the region: folks living in Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan and Hong Kong can now buy digital tomes from Mountain View. Play Books' latest journey doesn't stop there, though -- it has also donned its best hobbit garments to travel even more south and go on an adventure in New Zealand. It often takes a long time for services born in the US to land in other locations if they even do, so this counts as a huge victory for potential users living in those countries. Now, if only Google Music could follow suit...
Daily Update for July 25, 2013
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. Subscribe via RSS
A comprehensive look at Apple's ebook price fixing suit
A US District judge recently ruled that Apple conspired to raise e-book retail prices in an effort to keep rivals from using e-book prices as a loss leader. Apple is currently planning on appealing the ruling, but it will be months before it comes before the Circuit Court of Appeals, if the appeal gets approved at all. It was a complex suit that thanks to the appeals process is still ongoing, but what exactly was it all about? Adam Engst at TidBITS has written a comprehensive examination of Judge Denise Cote's 160 page opinion explaining why Apple lost the suit. At the heart of the suit was Amazon's loss-leader pricing on ebooks, regularly selling titles to readers for $9.99 regardless of whether or not that was less than Amazon paid publishers (which was intended to boost overall sales of Amazon's Kindle readers and the ebook market as a whole). Apple and book companies worried that this sort of pricing would create a false perception of the value of an ebook. In 2009, before Apple opened its own iBookstore, Amazon controlled 90% of the ebook market. When Apple entered in 2010 the company and publishers agreed to an "agency" model for ebook publishing, meaning the publishers set the price for books and in exchange they were paid a set percentage of sales. The rest of the TidBITS piece goes into the problems with the agency model, explains how exactly this deal was ruled as an antitrust violation, what happened legally to the publishers, and answers basically every question you could have about this suit. It's a long read, but it's a great analysis of a complicated situation.
Amazon Publishing launches Jet City Comics with Symposium #1
As of today, Amazon Publishing is entering the wonderful world of sequential art publishing with its new imprint, Jet City Comics. Its inaugural issue, Symposium #1 by Christian Cameron, is sure to please fans of Neal Stephenson's The Foreworld Saga. Also joining Jet City Comics are sci-fi/fantasy luminaries like George R.R. Martin and Hugh Howey. Martin will be teaming up with artist Raya Golden on an adaptation of Meathouse Man, a story so twisted, it makes Game of Thrones look like a Disney fairytale. Writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray (currently tearing it up on Batwing) will translate Howey's series of dystopian novellas, Wool, into a six-issue mini-series this October with a collected print edition to follow in 2014. For more information, check out the full press release after the break.
Open Air sees e-book sales success by publishing in the App Store
Paid Content is a fantastic blog for freelance and office professionals that covers paid-content business models for furthering the reach of your work. They've just published a useful interview with Jon Feldman, the CEO and founder of e-book publisher Open Air, about what it takes to get an e-book published in iOS. Open Air sells exponentially more titles through the App Store than it does via the iBookstore, between 10 to 30 times as much depending on the situation. Originally the company just published their books through the App Store, but when iBooks Author was launched, the company adapted its titles for the new market. What they thought would be a massive jump in sales turned out to be just another smaller market. Although iBooks Author allows publishers to make highly interactive e-books, consumer perception is that an app will be more interactive than an e-book. Accordingly when a customer visits their website and is given the option of an app or e-book version of a title they tend to move towards the app version, even when they feature similar content. According to Feldman, "My advice for publishers would be to carve out a digital-first division that would allow them to play in that space without having to think about Barnes & Noble or a shelf or a piece of paper at all." Head over to Paid Content for the rest of Feldman's advice. It's a wonderful look at the way small publishing dynamics are changing as the digital economy continues to grow.
Apple's Eddy Cue acknowledges e-book price increases at antitrust trial, reveals talk of Amazon deal that would split books/music control
The issue of e-book prices, and alleged price fixing, has come up again and again in recent years, with the focus most recently shifting to a Manhattan courtroom where Apple is at the center of an antitrust trial. After revealing new details of the company's market share yesterday, Apple's Eddy Cue has today offered another piece of surprising news: that he and Steve Jobs once discussed a potential deal that would see Apple stay out of the ebook market if Amazon agreed stayed out of music. There's no indication that went beyond the early discussion phase, or actually involved any discussions with Amazon, but it would obviously raise considerable antitrust questions had it gone any further. As CNET and The Verge report, the DOJ is hoping that revelation will bolster its case that Apple engaged in antitrust practices to inflate ebook prices across the market. On that front, Cue, who the DOJ describes as the "chief ringleader of the conspiracy," reportedly acknowledged that the prices of some ebooks did go up from April of 2010 (when it opened its iBookstore) through to 2012, but he attributed that to publishers unhappy with Amazon's $9.99 pricing. Cue's facing further questioning from Apple's attorneys this afternoon, with the trial expected to wrap up by the end of next week. Update: AllThingsD has further testimony from Mr. Cue indicating that Steve Jobs didn't even want to build iBooks -- at least, not until he got his hands on the first iPad.
Philip Pullman argues that authors are being shortchanged on e-book loans
Few people understand the magic of libraries better than Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, but all is not well when it comes to digital lending. As the soon-to-be president of the Society of Authors, Pullman is leading the charge against publishing houses that may be shortchanging writers on e-book loans. In a letter to major publishers like Random House and Bloomsbury, Pullman argues that selling e-books to libraries as single sales rather than licenses costs authors up to two-thirds the income they receive from print loans. The Society's brief calls for the industry to reconsider existing models for compensation so that writers can continue producing books with which to line library shelves. After all, without authors, there would be no books, and as Pullman himself wrote, "Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all."
If Apple vs. US goes to the Supreme Court
Forbes has an interesting take on on Apple vs. the US Government in the current antitrust case that stems from deals Apple made as it entered the e-book business. Forbes speculates whether the case could head to the Supreme Court and how Apple might do in that venue. Writer Roger Parloff believes this case is not a typical antitrust case saying, "Far from being a dominant player in the book industry, Apple was a new entrant. Far from instigating the scheme, it was -- even on the government's view of the evidence -- an opportunistic late-comer who exploited a pre-existing situation." Apple was trying to enter a field dominated by Amazon, and Amazon was selling books below cost to stimulate Kindle e-reader sales. Apple's position is it was trying to overthrow a monopoly held by Amazon, rather than trying to create a new one. The other defendants in the case, the e-book publishers, have all signed consent decrees admitting no wrong-doing. Apple will argue it was not part of any price-fixing scheme and entered the e-book business after the publishers were already allegedly colluding. It isn't known if the case will ever go before the Supreme Court, but Parloff and some other legal experts have weighed in with a belief that the Supreme Court is quite pro-business now, and Apple might have an advantage. Meanwhile, the Justice Department argues Apple has used its considerable weight to help the publishers in a pricing conspiracy. "Apple knew that ... the [higher] retail price would sharpen [publishers'] incentives to follow through on raising prices across all retailers." It's clearly not an open-and-shut case, and new laws or regulations could come out if it. Apple has been standing pat, and the outcome will certainly be very interesting.
E-books not growing much in Canada, slightly better in the US
A new study from BookNet Canada notes that the e-book market may be in trouble. Paperback books, says BookNet, made up 58 percent of all purchases last year, with hardcover taking 24 percent. But e-books were only 15 percent of total sales last year, a figure that's down overall from 2012's first quarter, where they made up 17.6 percent. In other words, e-books are selling, but they're hardly taking over the market. Now, those numbers reflect sales in Canada. In the US, e-books make up 22 percent of the market, so the numbers are higher here. But still, given how ubiquitous e-books now are, it's surprising to not see them taking more of the market. BookNet says buyers cite the convenience of shopping for other items at the same time and pricing as two reasons they're still looking for books in brick-and-mortar stores rather than online. Finally, Apple's iPad only made its way up to number three on the list of the most popular e-book readers in Canada. The Kobo e-book reader was the most popular up in the Great White North, followed by Amazon's Kindle and then Apple's tablet.
Slickdeals' best in tech for May 8th: Samsung NX1000 mirrorless camera and Amazon Kindle Fire
Looking to save some coin on your tech purchases? Of course you are! In this roundup, we'll run down a list of the freshest frugal buys, hand-picked with the help of the folks at Slickdeals. You'll want to act fast, though, as many of these offerings won't stick around long. Sure, tablets and cameras discounted on the regular in our twice weekly roundup, but today an A/V system sees the big price drop. A Denon AVR-1613 receiver and Harmon Kardon HKTS 16 speaker bundle is reduced by over 50% with the aid of a simple discount code. All of the particulars, and the rest of the list, await on the other side of the break.
E-Reading Rainbow: Hachette to bring entire e-book catalog to public libraries
If you're still balking at the cost of download-to-own e-books, and would rather stick to the tried-and-true library lending system, then this Hachette news is for you. Come next Wednesday, the entirety of Hachette's ebook catalog -- over 5,000 titles -- will be made available to nonprofit libraries throughout the US. The announcement and finalized pricing model follows two years worth of pilot testing, during which the publisher examined ebook consumption and lending habits at select libraries. Under the currently set terms of sale, e-books that bow in tandem with print editions will run three times the price of their physical counterparts for "single-user-at-a-time circulations, " with prices falling to just one and a half that of the hard copy one year later. By Hachette's own admission, this pricing scheme is not entirely set in stone -- the company plans to continually reevaluate the model on a per-year basis. So, there's hope yet the publisher will gouge libraries a bit less for the perks of e-borrowing.
Pay what you want for a virtual pile of video game ebooks
The new StoryBundle – a pay-what-you-want, DRM-free collection of eBooks – offers an instant collection of game history and culture, including Jordan Mechner's journals for Karateka and Prince of Persia, Videogames: In the Beginning by Ralph Baer (who would know!), Brendan Keogh's Killing is Harmless, a longform review/critique of Spec Ops: The Line, a couple of Kill Screen issues, and more. To get all the books, you need to pay at least $10; however, you can pay anything and get merely most of them. Either way, your ebook reader is going to be loaded up with game history.
Penguin offers settlement in European Commission investigation into e-book price-fixing
The European Commission has been investigating Apple and major book publishers over e-book price-fixing since late 2011. Today the EC published a notice on its website inviting comments on Penguin's proposal to end its existing pricing agreements with Apple and refrain from entering into similar agreements for five years. Last September, a proposal was put forward by Apple, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Macmillan and HarperColllins to let retailers set the price of e-books at any price for the next two years, as long as the discounts don't exceed the sales commissions the retailer gets from the publisher. It appears that Penguin, the sole holdout, is offering a similar proposal in order to settle. The European Commission has yet to accept the offer made by Apple and the publishers, but if it does, the investigation by the EC into the price-fixing agreements in Europe would be closed. The company is still being investigated in a similar e-book pricing case in the US, the lone holdout after Macmillan settled with the US Department of Justice in February -- the last publisher to do so.
Rumor: Amazon's Goodreads purchase cancelled a possible Apple partnership
The Wall Street Journal says that before Amazon's purchase of the Goodreads service earlier this year, Apple was planning to possibly integrate the social reading-recommendation service into its own iBookstore. Apple and Goodreads, says the WSJ, had been talking for a year or more about combining Goodreads' social ratings for books into the iBooks app directly, but of course Amazon's purchase put the kibosh on any such team-up. Amazon purchased Goodreads for what could be close to $200 million, and purportedly plans to use the service and its user reviews to help sell e-books on the Kindle bookstore. As for Apple, it's hard to say just what such a partnership would have looked like. Obviously Apple is willing to integrate partners in certain products, especially on iOS, where both Twitter and Facebook have seen fairly major social integration. But on the other hand, Apple's also very careful about mixing up brands, which is probably why any possible Goodreads partnership took as long as it did to come to light. Apple's seen a lot of success with iBooks, and so the company might be leery about including anyone else's content on that store. Nevertheless, thanks to the Amazon acquisition, integrating Goodreads on the iBookstore is no longer a possibility. Currently, users can review books on iBooks in exactly the same way they can review apps in the App Store, and that solution may be good enough for Apple for now.
AAP reports e-books now account for over 22 percent of US publishers' revenue
It's well off the triple year-over-year growth that e-books saw a few years ago, but the latest report from the Association of American Publishers shows that e-books did inch up even further in 2012 to account for a sizeable chunk of overall book sales. According to its figures, e-books now represent 22.55 percent of US publishers' total revenue -- up from just under 17 percent in 2011 -- an increase that helped push net revenue from all book sales up 6.2 percent to $7.1 billion for the year. As the AAP notes, this report also happens to mark the tenth anniversary of its annual tracking of e-book sales; back at the beginning in 2002, their share of publishers' net revenue clocked in at a mere 0.05 percent. The group does caution that the year-to-year comparison back that far is somewhat anecdotal, however, given changing methodologies and definitions of e-books.
Tim Cook ordered to testify in e-book case
According to Reuters, Apple CEO Tim Cook will have to sit for a deposition in the US government's case against Apple regarding e-book price fixing. US District Judge Denise Cote decided in favor of the Justice Department's request to have Cook on the stand. He will be made available for four hours on the day he's in the courtroom. In its request, the Justice Department argued that Cook likely had conversations with then-CEO Steve Jobs about e-books. Apple was opposed to having Cook take the stand, saying that his testimony would be "cumulative and duplicative," but Judge Cote apparently did not agree.
Blizzard releases excerpt from upcoming Dawn of the Aspects
If you're curious about the upcoming novel Dawn of the Aspects, Blizzard has just released an excerpt on its official site. The book, which will release part 1 on February 19, follows Kalegos on a journey to the past -- specifically, to the days before the Aspects were Aspects, and Galakrond still flew the skies of Northrend. It's a tale about the creation of the Aspects, and the history of dragonkind. More importantly, while Kalecgos is observing events of the past, he's doing so from the standpoint of the future -- the days after Deathwing's defeat. While the ending of Dragon Soul was definitely interesting, it raised far more questions than it answered. What happens to the dragonflights, not that they've lost their powers? What purpose do they serve in the world, and how can they continue to make a difference in this so-called Age of Mortals? Richard Knaak is an excellent choice for the novel, especially given his history with writing nearly every prior tale involving the Aspects and their history. The excerpt shown on Blizzard's official site is interesting, and even the small piece that we're shown holds valuable information regarding Galakrond, his history, and how it compares to the history we've been told so far. Suffice it to say, not everything is exactly as it has seemed, and the miniseries may clear up a giant chunk of Azeroth's history that to date has been left unexplained. Head to the official site to read the excerpt, and don't forget to get your copy of the ebook when it releases on February 19.
