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How do I dislike iBooks for OS X? Let me count the ways...
I banged the drums for OS X iBooks for years. Now, finally, Apple delivered. OS X Mavericks includes a desktop version of Apple's signature e-book-reading app. And after finally getting the iBooks I asked for, I've discovered that it's sadly not the iBooks I wanted. If anything, the desktop iBooks feels like an afterthought rather than a destination. It's slow and laggy, with awkward interaction and unsatisfying preferences. There's nothing there that feels like it adds to the reading experience, and a lot that detracts. Between clunky interface choices and poor rendering results, iBooks for OS X has been a huge letdown. Take interaction, for example. Unlike with Adobe Digital Editions, I cannot use my keyboard's Page Up and Page Down keys to navigate through books. iBooks assumes you want to navigate "bookishly" rather than "appishly," so left and right arrow keys are the shortcuts Apple has designed in. I've ended up using Keyboard Maestro, a key-remapping program, to restore my expected interaction styles rather than retraining my fingers. I know it doesn't make as much sense for a "book" metaphor to use page up/down, but this is the way I've grown used to and I'd rather the app do what I expect rather than adhere to metaphorical correctness. Worse, I cannot use the scroll wheel on my mouse in iBooks the way I can in Digital Editions. This is hugely frustrating when reading reference books -- especially if there's a bit of code I need to examine. I don't want to have it cross between pages. Some interaction is incomprehensibly fussy. Consider what it takes to turn a page. When tapping on my iPad, I can hit just about anywhere near the right or left margin and the page will turn according to my wishes. OS X iBooks is far less flexible Only about half the width of these margins causes the next page indicator (a circled chevron) to appear, enabling you to move on by clicking. Consider these two examples. The first shows a cursor position that allows me to click forward. In the second, the cursor is just slightly too far to the left. A click here does nothing at all. So frustrating! With iBooks, a lot of the text rendering can get downright unreliable when you adjust or reshape the page. This happens particularly when viewing material that goes beyond simple headlines and paragraphs. While the following sample renders perfectly in Digital Editions, no matter how I reshape the page, it takes just a few window tweaks to get iBooks to screw up. Until OS X iBooks debuted, most of my on-Mac reading was done using Preview for PDFs and a variety of e-book readers like Adobe Digital Editions for other formats like EPUB. Since none of these could handle Apple's DRM scheme, when it came to purchased items, I tended to limit my selections to the Amazon Kindle store. A few months with iBooks on OS X Mavericks has reinforced that rule of buying Kindle-only. Digital Editions may be ugly and unrefined, but it gets the job done and it currently does it a lot better than iBooks. I would never have expected to view that software abomination with anything approaching affection. How surprising it is, then, that I now do.
The Book and I: How the iPad has changed my reading life
Last week, I picked up a copy of The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter at the library. The book was sitting there on the shelf. I had heard some reasonably good buzz about it. So when it caught my eye, I did something I haven't done in a while. I checked out a dead-tree version. I also did something I had never done before. As I was reading the book, I stumbled across an unfamiliar word and, rather hilariously, ended up tapping the printed page until it finally occurred to me that the book wasn't going to offer me built-in dictionary and Wikipedia access. It's odd how three years or so changes you. Although the Kindle debuted in 2007, it wasn't until 2010 that I really jumped on the e-book bandwagon. My entry was due to the iPad. In fact, it was the iPad 2 even more than the original that firmly grounded me into the e-book world. Between the light, thin design of the tablet and my aging eyes, the iPad with its built-in iBooks app and the add-on Amazon Kindle reader app, I have become a devotee. I love e-books. In addition to in-line definitions and searches, I can zoom up the font however much I desire, read in the dark and lie in nearly any position while comfortably reading. My iPad also weighs significantly less than my hard-bound copy of Name of the Wind. In a way, the transition has been similar to the iPod revolution of the early 2000s. Instead of carrying around CDs, cassettes and so forth, the iPod made it possible to bring your entire music library with you. With the iPad, my library travels with me as well. With advances in connectivity, I'm now just a few taps away from buying and borrowing books while I'm on the go. I am now regularly borrowing books from the Denver Public Library. More and more local library systems are offering digital loans, and many of them deliver directly to the Kindle app. Admittedly, library culture hasn't quite caught up to the technology. The collections are often slap-dash and poorly curated. For example, here's a screenshot returned from a search for new Science Fiction arrivals. As enjoyable as My Fair Captain may be (Hi, Megs!), I suspect it doesn't really fall into the Science Fiction genre in any meaningful fashion. You're generally better off finding recommendations over at Goodreads rather than trying to spontaneously discover items through the library. Buying e-books has its occasional challenges as well. Take the new Moist von Lipwig book, for example. It debuted this November, in 2013. The e-book, however, won't launch until March 18, 2014. This shift, called "windowing", isn't an isolated incident, although it's not exactly a trend either. Publishers don't always release e-books at the same time as their print versions. For example, in the case of A Memory of Light, the final book in the Wheel of Time series, I ended up skipping the last volume entirely due to the shifted dates rather than wait several months for the e-book. (I did however read the Wikipedia entry, which had a vastly reduced amount of crossed arms, skirt smoothing and sniffing.) Patrick Nielsen Hayden tells me that windowing was much more practiced a few years ago. He says, "I think most of the editors and agents I know would agree that the practice is in decline." Instead, some books such as the re-release of Charles Stross' Merchant Princes novels are actually going digital first, appearing in the US several months before the print version to match up with their UK releases. So why is windowing still around? Nielsen Hayden says, "Some [publishers] were genuinely anxious about losing hardcover sales; some were doing it because their bestselling authors (or those authors' agents) were anxious. And for a lot of other reasons, most of which are summed up by William Goldman's observation about the entertainment industry in general: 'Nobody Knows Anything.' But here at the start of 2014, I think there's a growing consensus that, in commercial fiction publishing at any rate, 'windowing' isn't going to be the dominant model." I appreciate the way I can now download many e-book samples before buying. When a friend recommended I check out Cinder by Marissa Meyer, I was able to pick up a five-chapter trial version before splashing out my $8 on the full book. Turning that around, I was then able to pass along that recommendation to my friend Judy, giving her and her daughter a chance to try before buying. When buying e-books, I have had to perform major mental shifts. The whole "you don't own that" DRM approach means that at any time, I could possibly lose access to major parts of my collection. Baen Books and Tor are notable exceptions to this rule and I encourage you to check out Baen's e-book policy page and Tor's blog post about the change. I can't hand off books I no longer want to friends, to charities, or sell to pre-owned bookshops. Nor can I count on my books being there five, 10 or 20 years down the line. Fortunately, my children de-sentimentalized me pretty early on. They have completely different tastes in reading than I do. The special books I put aside assuming they'd love them (Nesbit, Eager, Wynne Jones, McKinley, etc.) have long since found new homes. I'm the first to admit as an early adopter that the technology has a long way to go. Both iBooks and the Kindle app are pretty awful at cataloging and organizing books. They haven't gone far past the "read the book" challenge into the "manage your library" one. My iPad collections are stuffed with items from various bookstores, from Project Gutenberg, and public libraries. In fact, the only way I have found to remove long-since-read-and-returned library items is through the online "Manage My Kindle" page. Despite this, I am more committed now than ever before to e-book reading. The comfort, convenience and overall experience blows the old dead-tree-style books out of the water. Stumbling across print-only books, such as John McWhorter's What Language Is, leaves me blinking and shooting off emails asking when the Kindle edition will finally debut.
iBook Lessons: Beyond the Story ships interactive book app for Almighty Johnsons, the best show you're not watching
The Almighty Johnsons is probably the best show you're not watching -- unless you live in Canada. Although the show airs in New Zealand as well, the viewer numbers there are roughly enough to put together a basketball team. On a good day. Crude, vulgar, hilarious and touching, the show is surprisingly well made, with a shoestring budget and a very real desperate sense of on-the-bubble/will-it-be-canceled-soon because of those pesty Kiwis who are failing to watch it. To put it in Canadian terms, it's as smart as Orphan Black, a lot funnier and more risk-taking than The Lost Girl. The show plays in Canada, the UK, Australia and, of course, it "airs" (not that anyone watches) in New Zealand. Today, Syfy announced a deal to debut the show in the US in 2014 (hopefully without too many edits for American tastes). Sadly, that air date means that the renew/don't renew decision might happen long before the US gets its first glimpse of the Johnson family. (You can still write letters of support to TV 3 in New Zealand, South Pacific Pictures or tweet a note of support/drop off a Facebook like.) That all said, the show has just jumped from the screen to iOS devices. Expatriate Kiwi developers Beyond the Story, based in London, but with Aotearoa accents, have been working with South Pacific Pictures, just recently delivering a show-specific app to the New Zealand and Canadian iTunes app stores. Their custom, enhanced-book platform was built over several years, with a 2.5 million pound development investment. Able to transform any long form text into an interactive experience, Beyond the Story has previously produced the quite noteworthy Diary of Anne Frank and the somewhat less noteworthy After Earth: Kitai's Journal. They have worked with Penguin and Harper Collins on additional titles. When visiting New Zealand, this past February, a meeting with South Pacific Pictures gave rise to the Almighty Johnsons app project. Offering script novelizations, behind the scenes insights, interviews with the actors, character sheets and more, the app includes a great deal of fan-centric material. On the geeky technical end of things, the app provided some interesting implementation details. Apparently, this is the first-ever TV novelization that's delivered live as the series premieres. As each broadcast goes to air, the app enables each "chaptersode." This was a bit tricky when dealing with multiple geographies, and multiple screening times. The developers focused on not ruining the experience for anyone. You cannot access a chaptersode until that program has gone to air. (When the app goes live in the UK and Australia, it will coordinate to the local broadcasts there for the third series.) Is it a great app? It... feels a little like DVD extras. This includes the hokey background music and tap-to-jump menu structure. The novelization is, well, what it is. It's not horrible, but I'm a little confused as to why it was included. The writing is fairly stiff, bringing little extra insight or liveliness. The background text material, too, feels like it's been repurposed, although I'm not entirely sure of that as a fact. The app presentation itself and the underlying engine, on the other hand, did show great promise. I'd very much like to check out the Anne Frank app now after seeing this one. I'm told the Anne Frank book/app will release globally near October. The best bits, in my opinion, are the behind-the-scenes video snippets, even though some of them are extremely spoilery at this time, especially James Griffin's discourse on Yggdrasil (although I do adore his shirt-of-radio-art). So be warned. I did not encounter any of the instability that users have mentioned in iTunes reviews. I tested the app on a somewhat geriatric iPad 2 running iOS 6. Is it worth the Canadian $3.99? I can't see why not, although spoilerphobes will want to wait until the entire series has aired before picking up a copy. It's as cheap or cheaper than a TV show magazine might be, and probably will offer at least as much enjoyment.
iBook Lessons: Why the Kindle App is still the best reader on iOS
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about e-book writing and publishing. The important thing about e-books is this: the reader matters a lot less than the content. Over time, I've found myself using iBooks less and less and less, as I now turn almost exclusively to Kindle for my iPad reading. There are several reasons for this. First, I can read my Kindle content on nearly any platform you can think of. Second, Kindle books are cheap. The same tech e-book that costs $36 on iTunes may show up up for $16.20 on Amazon. Amazon is deeply invested in the "reader thing". Last week, they acquired Goodreads, a popular site for sharing reviews and recommendations. The press release quoted Amazon VP Russ Grandinetti, who said "Amazon and Goodreads share a passion for reinventing reading. Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world. In addition, both Amazon and Goodreads have helped thousands of authors reach a wider audience and make a better living at their craft. Together we intend to build many new ways to delight readers and authors alike." You can anticipate that Amazon will start incorporating Goodread's net of recommendations into their reader hardware and software sometime in the near future. In the absence of an OS X iBook reading tool, some developers are tentatively testing out the waters. Latest to the scene is developer NeoMobili, whose Bookinist website just recently went live. I've signed up to get notified when they launch, and hopefully I'll soon get a chance to test out the promised public beta. Obviously, third parties will not be able to provide reading capabilities for DRM'ed e-books, providing another strike against buying them from the iBookstore instead of Kindle. No one is ever going to argue that Amazon has set new standards of excellence for their software. My OS X Kindle app is functional at best, ugly at worst. But in the end, it's the book that you're reading that creates the end-user experience, not how prettily the pages turn.
iBook Lessons: Could Amazon create a used e-book market?
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about e-book writing and publishing. This Slashgear writeup about a newly awarded Amazon patent just caught our eyes here at TUAW Central. Apparently, Amazon may be exploring an online used digital goods market. Amazon proposes to establish an "electronic marketplace for used digital objects." If that sounds a little ridiculous and yet curiously intriguing to you, well, you're not alone. The patent focuses on digital scarcity: As use of digital objects increases, users may wish to transfer the digital objects to other users. These transfers may include a sale, a rental, a gift, a loan, a trade, etc. However, several problems manifest when transferring a digital object. While a physical object such as a copy of a paperback book only exists in one place at a time, easy and inexpensive copies of a digital object without loss of fidelity are possible. Thus, easy copying and repeated sale of the same digital object is possible, potentially eliminating scarcity of the digital object. Because of this, many owners implement digital rights management to prevent such impermissible transfers. Furthermore, the digital object as originally transferred to the initial purchaser may have license restrictions or other limitations on permissible use or further transfer. For example, a license to use a free download of a popular song may expire after a few days. A secondary market which allows users to effectively and permissibly transfer "used" digital objects to others while maintaining scarcity is therefore desired. A "used" digital object is one to which a user has legitimately obtained access or ownership rights (hereinafter "access rights"), and to which the user may permissibly transfer to another user. Obviously, the technology would cover a transfer of rights from one owner to the next, but how would one value and implement these transfers? Would there be a fixed cut or fee to the facilitator? Does the rights-holder get a cut? And how could one assign a monetary worth to a "new" license versus a "used" one? (After all, the bits are the same, aren't they? "There are five new copies of this product and three used ones" just sounds wrong when it comes to digital goods.) You might imagine this transfer only being allowed for DRMed content that's centrally controlled, such as Amazon and Apple's current e-book systems. I don't see content providers going crazy for this unless they benefit directly. They are not generally, let us say, "relaxed parties" in these matters. Because honestly, who wouldn't like to sell back or trade music, games and movies you no longer listen to, play with or watch? Which makes me wonder. How much are all my free iTunes singles of the week worth in resale? Yeah, that's what I thought too.
iBook Lessons: Book Creator for iPad
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about e-book writing and publishing. You wouldn't think that the iPad makes a natural match to e-book content creation, would you? Red Jumper Studio thinks otherwise. Its US$4.99 app, Book Creator for iPad, enables you to build EPUB works directly from iOS. Aimed at light projects such as photo collections and kid-created stories, Book Creator provides a simple layout system to integrate text, pictures and sounds. I found the app relatively straightforward to use, although it would greatly benefit from presets. Libraries of header and body styles would make the tools so much easier to use, especially since this is more an expressive tool for kids and hobbyists than a tightly controlled design environment. I wish I had a Siri-ready iPad around to test with, as this app feels like a perfect match to dictation. Using a built-in iPad camera to snap pictures and then describing what I see using words feels naturally synchronous. As it was, Book Creator worked fine on my iPad 2. My favorite feature was e-book export. I was able to build my book and place it into my Dropbox folder, ready to share by email or read back on my Mac. The app also exported directly to iBooks. Although dedicated self-publishers are not the right target audience for this app, I'm sure it would be a great match for schools, crafters, photographers and others. Not every book needs to live on the iBookstore or Amazon. Here's another way to use e-publishing technology, but just for fun.
iBook Lessons: Advanced page flipping demo
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Much as I love iBooks' beautiful page scrolling, there's always room for improvement. By studying the way people interact with real books -- browsing for information and adjusting pages while reading -- the developers of the "Smart E-Book Interface Prototype" have added a lot of clever into the ebook. A video demonstrating the interface follows. It presents some intriguing directions. The KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence, who produced this video, has an English-language summary page about their ongoing research. It's a really impressive video for R&D work. Hopefully this kind of advance will soon make its way into consumer e-readers. And, no matter what wiseacre YouTube commenters say, you probably shouldn't roll up your iPad and use it to swat any flies. Hat tip, Jeremy Tregunna
iBook Lessons: e-book Typography offers in-depth advice on creating expressive works
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about e-book writing and publishing. eBook Typography (US$6.99) by Chris Jennings helps e-book authors push visual boundaries by providing in-depth advice on how to add custom typography to EPUB creations. This e-book demonstrates and explains how to use HTML and CSS to handcraft striking typography. Offering how-to at a deeper level than you'd normally work with via iBooks Author or a Microsoft-Word-to-Amazon conversion tool, this work is aimed at book publishers looking for controlled, professional output. It discusses the likely platforms you're designing for and possible snags you might run into along the way. For example, as the book points out, you cannot prevent iPad users from changing paragraph fonts. There are many other topics introduced by the author, all of which represent common design challenges faced in professional publishing. You might be looking to custom-set the font for the first line of an opening paragraph using upper-case-only text or you might want to create distinct sidebars with colored backsplashes and visual flourishes. This book shows you how. eBook Typography covers a range of typography topics from spacing and embellishment to columns and page breaks, offering many examples along the way. I found the book absolutely fascinating to browse through. It's not a particularly long, book but its detail-oriented explanations are exactly the thing any boundaries-pushing self-publisher would be looking for. If you're not scared by the EPUB container, and are willing to dive deep and tweak at the HTML/CSS level, this is the book for you.
iBook Lessons: Hardback-only Memory of Light release frustrates would-be epurchasers
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. I was rather surprised this morning when, upon visiting Amazon, I found myself unable to purchase Brandon Sanderson's Memory of Light from the Kindle store. A major Tor release, Memory of Light wraps up the Wheel of Time series originally penned by the late Robert Jordan. With its e-only inventory, the iTunes iBookstore leads only to a placeholder and a note about unavailable items. That's because Tor isn't planning to release the Memory of Light ebook until April 9th. (The U.K. option is, by the way, only a pre-order. Their release date is the same as in the US.) I found this a curious decision in the age of the instant purchase gratification offered by Amazon and the iBookstore. I had been ready to drop my $20 this morning and quite looking forward to the book. Instead, I suppose I'll either head off to the library today to hope I can snag one of the "New and Hot" copies that my library always keeps back from the standard holds list (it's a strategy that has occasionally worked in the past). Or, I might visit Target or Walmart to pick up a heavy and smelly dead tree version that I frankly would prefer not to buy. There's something about Tor's hardback ink and paper choices that really makes my sinuses ache. To anyone paying attention, which clearly I wasn't, this ebook release date shouldn't have been a surprise. Tor announced it in a press release almost a year ago. Like me, most purchasers haven't been keeping track of things at such fine detail and today's hardback-only release came as an unwelcome shock, as you can see from the reviews from the first hours of the book's release. A majority of reviews, including both one-star and five-star items take a stance on the ebook status. The one-starrists say they are applying pressure on Tor to rethink their stance. Several five-star reviews attempt to counterweigh the negatives. Meanwhile, rumors are swirling as to why Tor made the decision it did: specifically, whether Jordan's widow and editor forced their hands, and if the NY Times bestseller ratings could be skewed by a simultaneous ebook release that would limit the prestigious hardcover fiction numbers in favor of less desirable ebook listings. TUAW contacted Tor for a statement on this policy but did not hear back before this post went live. We're very much living in a different world than three years ago when the iBookstore debuted. We carry entire libraries around on our iPads and Kindles (or in my case, the Kindle app on my iPad, my preferred reading poison). To be guided (I'd rather not use the word "forced", as I am perfectly capable of waiting until April) to a hardback purchase is something that feels distinctly retro. Back in 2009, publishers began delaying ebook releases, as they noted that ebook sales cannibalized hardcover sales. Even then an Amazon spokesperson was quoted by the NYT saying, "Authors get the most publicity at launch and need to strike while the iron is hot. If readers can't get their preferred format at that moment, they may buy a different book or just not buy a book at all." Fast forward 3 years. This year, ebook sales surpassed hardcover sales for the first time, according to the Association of American Publishers. With a growing demand, lower distribution costs, and a shorter production schedule (no printing and shipping needed), you'd think that publishers would be moving towards simultaneous release if not, as my publisher Pearson does it, ebooks and then print. As for striking while the iron is hot, I know that quite a few potential purchasers of a Memory of Light were surprised this morning, and then sad. Here's hoping that Tor pushes up the ebook release date to meet customer demand. [Thanks to former TUAW editor Scott McNulty for the tip]
iBook Lessons: Childrens picture books
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. I recently had occasion to give advice regarding an author considering the move from traditional books to ebooks. Normally, in these cases, I recommend starting with Amazon. It offers the simplest tools for publishing manuscripts with a minimum of effort. In this case, the material was a children's picture book. And because of that, I suggested going with the iBookstore instead. The iBooks Author software, available freely from Apple, provides a much better match to picture book layout and interaction than standard document-to-EPUB conversion tools. For picture books, which typically run 32 pages in length, the layout is just as important as the content. iBooks Author offers fixed page layout, so you can be sure that the page you design and the page the reader sees are essentially the same. This makes it the best match for many cookbooks, textbooks, and of course, picture books. Best of all, it's pretty easy to pick up for anyone with some technological mastery. As an alternative, advanced design tools like Adobe InDesign enable you to create fixed layout using traditional EPUB 3, but the software is expensive and the technological demands are higher. (Link is to a PDF describing the process of converting childrens books to EPUB 3 using InDesign.) The advantage to EPUB is a potentially wider audience, but you do so subject to the whims of the rendering platform without the guarantees of page fidelity that Apple brings to the table with iBooks. There's no implied contract of performance. As Smashwords CEO Mark Coker points out, "Any time you add complexity to a book, you create opportunities for incompatibility or limit the number of supported platforms." One of the challenges of a fixed format book is that it limits the platform on which it can be read. With iBooks Author, you limit your audience to iPad owners. The expanded iBooks format is only available for tablet reading. The unfortunate side of choosing fixed layout is that you lose out on many services that exist to transform manuscripts to EPUB formats. Sites like Smashwords, Lulu, and FastPencil offer simple-to-use book conversion and publishing options. You upload a manuscript, choose a template, and publish. They are a perfect match for casual writers without a tech background. That kind of automated conversion just doesn't seem to exist for fixed layout projects. Coker explained that fixed layout isn't an easy path, even for a constantly evolving service. "We're looking to the future to see how we can add other formats," he said. Smashwords currently supports EPUB 2, but is exploring additional formats including EPUB 3 and other fixed layout solutions like iBooks. "Just within the last week, we introduced a new feature called Smashwords Direct," he said. "The service allows authors and publishers to upload their own professionally formatted EPUB files." Prior to the Direct service, Smashwords limited their uploads to Microsoft Word documents. "This is the first time we've allowed a format other than just Word docs. We see this as the first step, a foundational element for supporting other file formats." Coker expressed interest in distributing books in iBooks format to Apple as well. "We're taking it one step at a time. Our Direct service is in beta. We're going to work on working out the kinks for the first generation then look to the future to see how we can add the other formats." Coker could not offer a timeline due to the exploratory nature of the initiative. In the end, the best bet for the picture book situation is probably to give iBooks Author a try. There are many excellent books and websites that guide you through the process and teach you how to use the app. Have experience using conversion bureaus? Share your stories in the comments.
iBook lessons: Mac clients and built-in updates
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about e-book writing and publishing. Since yesterday's announcement, I've been having a series of conversations -- in email, on the phone, on Twitter -- regarding iBooks, the iBookstore, and why iBooks for Mac remains missing in action. Many in the book world are well aware that Amazon's Kindle reader runs on nearly every platform you can think of, from iOS to Android, OS X to Windows, and in web browsers as well. In a world guided by DRM, readers can ubiquitously access Kindle purchases. Apple's iBookstore continues to have a single client: iBooks for iOS. Yes, the iPad is a delightful reading platform. At the same time, there's no denying that Amazon outpaces iBookstore sales for nearly every title I've worked with. Customers like the control Kindle offers them in how and where they read their books. When faced with a buying choice, readers regularly choose Kindle by a wide margin. There isn't a practical option for a third-party iBooks solution for OS X and Windows. DRM encryption means reverse-engineering Apple's system, an unrealistic basis for establishing a business. Plus, I'm sure Apple has already explored the notion of a desktop client in the run-up to the January 2010 iBooks announcement and since then. I remain puzzled though as to why Apple is not pushing to release iBooks for Mac. I can't imagine that the technical issues for a desktop-based reader are that insurmountable, so it must be a marketing and business decision, or a failure to staff and push the initiative. A Mac and Windows reader would certainly increase book sales; could it depress iPad sales? I wouldn't think so. iBooks 3 launched yesterday, bringing with it expanded dictionaries and continuously scrolling titles. This latter is what Mike T. Rose calls "Megillah" mode, referring to a book traditionally presented as a single scroll of text. In addition, the iBookstore will now allow publishers to push book updates, letting books receive new versions the same way apps do. From an author/publisher's point of view, this provides a mixed bag of blessings and frustrations. For the most part, when a book is done, it's done. Books go through an extended process of reviews and edits that put most apps to shame. Publishers do their best to produce the most polished creations they can, and post errata for any flaws that slip through the cracks. For top-selling books, errors can be fixed in subsequent printings, but all updates involve a huge investment in production overhead and page layout. The costs have to be worth it. In the apps world, it's common to push out point releases that offer simple bug fixes. The new iBookstore update feature is where books meet apps, and it's something that offers mixed benefits. Publishers will welcome the ability to tweak and refine manuscripts. Readers, however, may expect a commitment to relentless perfection that book creators cannot provide. With updates, e-books -- like apps -- become a project that never ends. Will readers revolt with one-star reviews when authors create enhanced and new editions -- now a common practice -- rather than pushing those updates to existing customers? Book updates, like app updates, don't offer a paid upgrade path and there are, as yet, no in-book purchase programs. Mistakes happen; they are part of the human experience. As an author and publisher, I'm glad the update mechanism exists. Trying to push an update through Amazon last year was a huge hassle, and Apple's approach looks far friendlier. But will updates become a big part of my publishing methodology? At this time, I see them as a safety mechanism, not an opportunity for growing a new business.
Why Amazon's Whispercast matters
Apple's upcoming media event isn't scheduled until next week. I've already gone on record about my views about the so-called iPad mini's potential. I think with the mini, Apple has a big chance to push forward the education initiative the company introduced earlier this year. That's why Amazon's Whispercast announcement this week, detailing a solution for managing a fleet of Kindles, matters. Amazon Kindle VP David Limp described the new technology: "Whispercast [is] a free, scalable solution for school and business administrators to centrally manage thousands of Kindles and wirelessly distribute Kindle books...to their users." A free online tool, Whispercast enables central content administration for procuring, distributing and monitoring Kindle books. With it, schools and districts can adopt Kindle technology across their entire system. What's more, administrators can set acceptable use policies, such as blocking social networks and web browsers, keeping students from accessing Facebook with their Whispercast devices. We don't know what Apple's event will cover, but this kind of large-scale deployment sets a bar that Apple needs to meet -- soon if not next week. At TUAW, we believe that winning the classroom will win the tablet. If Apple cannot respond to Whispercast, they cannot win that classroom. Apple's enterprise tools for iOS and support for mobile device management have advantages for big organizations, but the textbook (and app) volume purchasing setup doesn't have quite the fluidity of what Whispercast will deliver. MDM at a basic level is doable with Apple's Mountain Lion Server, but larger deployments may require extensive IT support and investment, which most schools don't have at their disposal. In contrast, Whispercast is cloud-based and free. (There are several cloud-based MDM options for iOS, to be sure, with Meraki, Zenprise and MaaS360 among them, but they aren't free.) Whispercast is far from an education panacea, however. While Whispercast offers large-scale setup and deployment, it seems to lack program analysis: tracking, testing and assessment of student success. Whispercast modernizes the textbook but it doesn't directly address the learning process. That's an area in which Apple has shown leadership. In January, Apple attempted to reimagine the textbook. It introduced iBooks Author, a design tool meant to revolutionize e-book layout and creation. With numerous technologies to engage students, its textbooks are certainly more exciting and beautiful. But these enhancements still lack an important component of digital education. Although iBooks Author provides an option to create review widgets, it lacks any communication capabilities to send quiz results or assessments back to teachers. Third parties have worked on creating solutions, but the purely educational component of bidirectional assessment seems to be an area that remains up in the air. Meanwhile, companies focused on learning management and delivery systems for adult/institutional education (outside the iBooks ecosystem) are pushing the tablet envelope forward at a frantic pace, and the largest higher-ed trial of bulk purchasing for e-textbooks is happening without Apple's direct participation. We believe that a truly successful tablet for K-12 and higher ed needs to command respect in all the natural areas of educational support: from document distribution, to platform control, to lesson planning, to assessment. Whispercast is a big step forward. We can't wait to see how Apple responds.
Why the iPad mini? One word: Textbooks
I was at the dentist the other day, where I was talking to Laura-the-receptionist about tablets. "I'm sick of paying for rebinding [my kids' textbooks] every year," she told me. "My kid's teacher suggested we buy a tablet and purchase textbooks from Amazon instead of fixing them. Which tablet should I buy?" Although schools pay a nominal fee per rebinding, parents often have to cough up a significant amount more. Cherry Creek High School charges $28 to rebind a single book. The eBook text costs just $14.99. It's a bargain until you start considering the tablet overhead. The base Kindle sells for $70; the Fire for $200 -- although you can now buy used models for significantly less. The base iPad 2 starts at $399 and refurbished units are scarce on the ground at the online Apple Store. The Apple experience, it's clear, comes at a premium. Although the Fire represents an outlay of nearly 3x more than the Kindle, many parents like the idea that their kid can surf the web, read email, and even run graphing calculator apps. As a point of reference, the TI NSpire sells for "just" $150 on Amazon (MSRP is $175.) iPads are even more desirable, with their well-designed interface, expansive app store and broad support ecosystem. But they fail to compete on the basis of their price tag compared to a base Kindle + a TI calculator. Between textbooks, research-related web access, calculator features, and e-mail contact with teachers, more parents than ever are on the hunt for inexpensive tablets, with the emphasis on inexpensive. So why go tablet? Apple laid out many of the reasons in its education event early this year. The iPad, as Apple reminded us, communicates with the world. Apple has built an education business based on "teaching, learning, and student achievement" with over 20,000 iPad apps specific to education. Apple's education-centric iBooks Author initiative focused on recreating the textbook. It attempted to engage students and expand the learning experience. The problem with that initiative is that Apple's bottom-line hardware starts at a price that's double that of the competition. To make the iPad a real choice in the education marketplace, Apple needs an entry that competes with the bargain-basement tablets. iPads may be on every teen's Christmas wishlist, but parents are hard-pressed not to compare bottom lines. That's why there's going to be the iPad mini. On October 23, Apple will likely launch a scaled-down iPad with basic features and a consumer-ready price. This is the event that parents like Laura have been waiting for. For many, the iPad mini means that Apple will be a choice in a market where formerly parents might have felt priced out of buying. A smaller screen size and fewer options may allow students and their parents -- whether middle school, high school, or college -- to buy into the Apple ecosystem, where they formerly could not. In the end, Apple's entire drive towards re-inventing the textbook doesn't matter if there aren't enough eyeballs and fingers to appreciate those titles with their rich tapestry of interactive design. An iPad mini will open the education market to a much broader range of customers and allow Apple to grow a customer base by investing in the future.
iBook Lessons: Traditional publishers react to new trends
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. A year ago, traditional publishers seemed hopelessly left behind as a new world of instant-pub media emerged. Self-publishing, specifically via services and tools like those provided by Apple's iBookstore/iBooks Author and Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, provided a way for independent authors to challenge the marketplace. Independent authors could write, publish and distribute short works that followed closely on trends as they happened. As new technology was announced, writers could immediately address that market. Apple might introduce a new OS bump or deliver a new tablet. Indie authors could develop and deliver materials on a new kind of timeline, often just weeks after an announcement. Last year, Apple launched the iPhone 4S in early October, a device offering the new Siri virtual assistant. By the end of October, Steve Sande and I had written and self-published "Talking to Siri", a guide to the new technology. If we had worked with traditional publishing at that point, it would likely have taken at least four to six months to get that same book out. In the end, we were able to leverage the success of our self-published efforts to create a deal with Que, one of Pearson's (Addison Wesley) technical imprints to bring "Talking to Siri" to the printed page. The book was printed in the Winter of 2012, months after Siri launched and has sold consistently well in traditional bookstores like Barnes & Noble, as well as on the virtual shelves of Amazon and the iBookstore. We both feel our early launch was a key player in this success. Fast forward a year, and the world has begun to turn upside down. Traditional publishers are now tentatively exploring the frontier of rapid publishing. It's not an easy change. A lot of work goes into delivering a professionally produced book. Production, digital conversion, marketing, business and web site support teams all have to come together to make this happen. Pearson just launched an Early Edition program to offer readers advanced access to new, timely topics. Early Editions provide early peeks at books during the production process. It allows readers to buy-in much sooner, to get access to relevant materials -- even in a somewhat unfinished state. It trades off this rapid delivery to its audience against the time-intensive process that ensures high quality published editions. The fact is this: The tech world moves quickly. Apple typically updates its hardware and software on a yearly basis. A book that takes six months to produce may offer an unreasonably shortened shelf life. Consider developer-specific topics, for example. Taking Apple's no-pub Nondisclosure Agreement periods (NDAs) into account, where material cannot be publicly discussed, each year may offer at best nine months of sales availability. Cutting off a third to a half of this time due to publishing delays puts huge pressures on authors and publishers. The quicker publishers can move materials into the public, the longer each book's shelf life can be, and the more possible sales it can offer. I was fortunate to be part of Pearson's first Early Edition push. My Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook went live the day after the iOS 6 NDA dropped. In exchange for basically working non-stop since WWDC, Pearson was able to accelerate editing and technical review. Readers can now purchase a volume that although not perfectly polished, offers time-sensitive content that's useful for immediate iOS 6 development needs. For me, from an author's point of view, it's a huge step forward. Moving to a world of quick pub turn-around didn't come easily. Development editors Chris Zahn and Dayna Isley spearheaded the Pearson initiative, with strong encouragement from management. An in-house group titled "Digital Only / Digital First" helped imagine their digital strategy. The digital task force included a cross section of editorial, production, conversion and marketing folks. The team brainstormed how to publish e-formats before print versions came out. They decided on a group of books to focus on (the iOS 6 series) and chose to move content into ePub, Mobi, and PDF formats right after copy edit. This is right before manuscripts would traditionally go into the composition process and then eventually to the printer. The harder issues weren't authoring and editing content; it was paperwork. "As a group, we had to figure out how to get out of our own way," Zahn explained. "We had to decide how to enter products into our business systems, how to present them for sale on our site and how to market them. We got marketing, the InformIT folks and production on board. Somehow it all came together, and we ended up with a successful rollout of the Early Edition program this October." Today, I had a chance to sit down with Paul Boger, Vice-President and Publisher at Pearson Technology Group. He's the man who gave the green light to the Early Editions program. He took some time to talk about the evolution of the book, about the program itself, and where traditional publishers need to move when looking to the future. TUAW: Tell me about the Early Edition program. PB: We, here at Pearson, have a number of people here who are intensely interested in figuring out how to break the mold of the physical book. We're exploring how to move beyond the constraints of the physical production process to provide critical information to people as fast as we possibly can. The Early Edition program is part of that vision. We have a number of people in our group -- Dana Isley, Chris Zahn, Trina MacDonald, Stephanie Nakib -- who believed that we could, with tweaks to our process, publish weeks ahead of the physical book if were able to bend the process a little bit. So that group of people got together to do this with our line of iOS 6 books (including the Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook, Learning Objective-C 2.0, and Programming in Objective-C) for the new Early Editions. In the process, we're learning a lot. It's helping make our readers and authors really happy by getting ideas and expertise out even faster. TUAW: What were some of the challenges you've encountered? PB: A lot of the challenges are cultural rather than physical. We're book publishers by professional training. We're used to thinking that content needs to look a certain way, be presented a certain way, be finished to a certain level. We're trying really hard to put those assumptions away. We're learning to disregard those knee-jerk opinions about when something is "finished" and "usable" and when it's not. One of the concepts we haven't cracked yet is how and when can we create "books" (I use air quotes there) that are never really finished. How do you create new books that are alive all the time? We're not there yet but we're working on that problem really hard. TUAW: What does it mean to be a "book" -- I'll use the air quotes, too -- in the world of electronic publishing? PB: I think the word "book" is changing to mean something printed on paper, contained between two covers, and sold as a unit. Ebooks mean something different. Ebooks are developing their own set of commercial expectations -- whether it's the author or reader who has set those expectations. Plus, we think there's something else we haven't named yet in the mix. We use the catchphrase "content" but it's something quite different. For example, what does it mean to "buy" a book when it's something that can be updated? Tech publishers have played around with the subscription model, with Wiki-based books, and so forth. We at Pearson publish content with Safari Books Online. It's a purely digital delivery platform with no physical component. When someone buys a printed book, I think increasingly they're buying the physical manifestation of content at a certain point in time. When they buy an ebook, I think that expectations at least for tech consumers is that that content will continue changing. More and more our customers expect when they buy that ebook they'll receive updates. When technology changes or there are new techniques, consumers expect the content to change in real time. Publishers have to catch up with that expectation and they really haven't yet. TUAW: What are consumers looking for in electronic books? And how can these books remain current and fresh? At some level, what you're buying is the author's expertise and the question remains: How does the publication vehicle help an author deliver that expertise in a way that is efficient for everyone? Obviously, authors can't spend 24/7 updating just one product -- there are a whole family of products to attend to, plus blog plus other things [that an author might be involved in]. Publishers have to make it easy for authors to interact with customers and update content. And we have other challenges. In my group, for instance in Sams Publishing, we publish a lot of open source texts that change all the time. When have we compiled enough changes to justify releasing a new edition of an 800 or 1000 page "book"? That's the physical challenge, namely when have there been enough changes to have customer buy a new book versus how do we deliver new info for people who've bought existing books? Ebook updates may be one way to do that -- but we all feel there's a better way, we just haven't discovered it yet. TUAW: How does publishing have to change? PB: Traditional publishers are being forced to examine the value and services that they create for authors and for end-users. Maybe I should use the word readers here, instead, but we have for a long time considered them end-users. We're lucky to work at a place like Pearson where there's pressure on us to innovate and think outside the box. It's an exciting and terrifying time to be a publisher because you're not just competing with other publishers but also with app developers, websites that help answer specific questions, and even with people who send alerts to someone's phone. We're now working with schools who deliver their courses online and adapting to the whole phenomenon of "MOOCs," massively open online courses. I've never experienced this much change in my entire career, when it comes to teaching people how to do things. We're trying to explore every opportunity and still pay the light bill. TUAW: What would an ideal book look like? PB: My ideal would involve a digital content presentation that allows interactivity where appropriate, where it adds value rather than just representing a distraction with bells and whistles. The ideal book could be regularly updated based on customer feedback collected either within the book itself or provided by readers/customers via a direct relationship with the author and the publisher. The ideal book could be printed and provided to physical bookstores, when it was efficient or necessary to do that. But I think we'd start with a digital presentation of the information and then add value to that experience. TUAW: What kinds of test programs are you working with now? PB: One of our groups is experimenting with iBooks and ePub. They're trying to figure out how to create better ebook experiences. Then there's the early edition program and some work we're developing on interactive learning. In another part of our business, we're developing simulation software for certification students. We're moving our certification content to a digital learning platform called "My Labs." Pearson developed this for the education market to provide assessment and remediation. It includes video and simulation content, and is intended for use in labs setting. We sell that to the education market primarily. And, we have a longstanding video training program that we're currently expanding. We sell these on our website and through Safari Books Online. Plus we've got all kinds of other stuff going on as well. All of these depend on our authors. Open minded authors are still the primary component of our success. Nothing good happens if we're not willing to try sailing on new seas every once in a while. Our Early Editions program wouldn't be available if authors like you weren't willing to experiment with us. It's a really exciting time. You can follow Paul on Twitter at @pboger.
iBook Lessons: Take Control of iBooks Author
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Michael E. Cohen is an ebook designer, instructional software developer and the author of "Take Control of iBooks Author". This new book introduces iBooks Author to users, and discusses publication through the iBookstore. Cohen agreed to sit down with TUAW to talk about ebooks, the iBookstore, and creating books using the iBooks Author tool. TUAW: Michael, you've been doing this a long time -- and by "long time," I mean since before the dawn of the ebook. Can you tell us a bit about your experience in the ebook world, and where you're coming from? Cohen: It all began on Bloomsday in 1990 (for those unfamiliar with James Joyce, June 16 is the day his novel Ulysses was set, and is Bloomsday to Joyce fans). The Voyager Company had just made a name for itself in the Mac world by producing the first interactive CD-ROM for consumers, Robert Winter's HyperCard exegesis on Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Bob Stein, who ran Voyager, and who came from a publishing background, was interested in what could be done with text on a computer and he got a grant to bring a bunch of scholars and geeks together to discuss it at an in-house conference. I was working at UCLA at the time as a technical advisor for the Humanities Computing Facility (actually the job title was User Relations Liaison). One of the invitees was Richard Lanham, a professor of English and specialist in rhetoric. Dick and I were friends, and he invited me to tag along to the meeting (I had turned some of his book, Revising Prose, into a computer program for the Apple II a few years earlier, and had done a sample version of his Handlist of Rhetorical Terms as a HyperCard stack). It was at that meeting that Voyager began what become known as the Expanded Books project. At the end of the meeting, Bob Stein offered me a job -- jokingly, I thought. But it wasn't a joke; a few months later I had left UCLA to work at Voyager, ostensibly on a CD ROM edition of Macbeth but also as part of the Expanded Books team. So that's how I came into this business. TUAW: What were some of the Expanded Books projects you worked on, and what lessons did you learn while creating them? Cohen: Oh, my. Got an hour? TUAW: I do! But the condensed version is fine. We're on your schedule here... Cohen: I began working with the people who were trying to imagine just what it would mean to put a book on the computer (specifically the just released line of Mac PowerBooks). So we spent a lot of time doing mock-ups, trying to imagine what qualities/features/functionality people expected from books and how to best express them simply and cleanly on the PowerBook, in HyperCard. Some lessons were simple: how to mark pages and passages. We came up with interfaces for that (dog-ears, margin lines, and slideable paper-clips). The issue of how to show where one was in a book was another: we developed a hideable "page gauge" for that. Fixed versus variable pagination was another. We went with fixed pages...BUT we also developed a way to double the text size while retaining the same pagination for those who were older and wanted larger print. Taking notes was another. We came up with an in-book notebook. We also looked to the past. We were asked to look at Elizabeth Eisenstein's treatise about the 100 years following Gutenberg, and how printing changed the world. We were very interested in how that was being replicated at a much faster pace with the invention of digital technology. Basically, we came up with an interface that was a book-like as possible. And we consciously decided not to patent or copyright it. We were interested in publishing books and figured that if we made the interface available for others to copy, we could help establish ebook conventions. That way, there could emerge a vibrant ebook market. And it would have worked, too, if that rascal Tim Berners-Lee hadn't unleashed the World Wide Web, and destroyed the nascent interactive media market in the process! I helped write the HyperCard scripts for the first ebooks, and personally laid out the first three ebooks Voyager published: Jurassic Park (before the movie!), The Complete Annotated Alice by Martin Gardener, and Douglas Adam's Complete Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. TUAW: Many of those revolutionary aspects you worked on are now available in iBooks Author. Looking at iBooks Author with all your experience, how do you evaluate this tool? What ground does it break and what does the software mean in the overall ebook world? Cohen: Some of our inventions (like bookmarks and page gauges) are still in use by most ebook makers. Ah, iBooks Author. How do I evaluate it? I have two perspectives on it: one as an educator (and trainer of educators) and one as a crazy geek who likes to customize and extend technology. As one who has worked training teachers to use digital technology in instruction, I have to say that iBooks Author is the bee's knees and cat's pajamas. Really. It is something that offers most of the features one would want in a digital textbook, and, more importantly, one that I could teach intelligent faculty to use profitably (in the educational, not remunerative sense) in a few hours. As a geek I am disappointed that it is not more extensible, and uses a proprietary framework (but one that IS very close to the EPUB 3 standard). But, overall, I am delighted to see it...and very sad that it took over 20 years since we started making ebooks for it to emerge. As for what it means...gosh, I could speculate. My hope is that it creates a thriving marketplace for ebooks in education. I think Apple is being clever here: use education as a way to expand the capability of ebooks, and then extend that capability to non-instructional books over time. Meanwhile, it solves the ugly problem of ever larger and more expensive textbooks that kids have to carry around. TUAW: What are some of the features in iBooks Author that excite you the most? Cohen: Well, obviously its existence itself is the biggest feature. It's a way to create attractive inexpensive textbooks? That's huge. The various widgets are the other big features: they are suitable for so many different kinds of instructional use. And I'm personally intrigued by the misnamed HTML widget (it's actually more of a way to host Dashboard-style HTML/Javascript widgets inside of the iBooks framework). Had I world enough and time, I'd spend hours and hours playing with ways to use it. The templates are another big feature. They provide an easy way for novices to quickly produce attractive materials, but are also extensively customizable for the more professional book developer. TUAW: Are there some features you feel could still be improved? Cohen: What don't I like? The fact that it is proprietary. I understand why it is, but I don't like that it is. And I don't like that it doesn't easily support collaborative work: many textbooks have multiple authors, but iBooks Author doesn't lend itself well to distributed authorship. Also, there's no change tracking and no sidebar comments, the kinds of tools available in Word and Pages TUAW: Who is the target audience for your book, and what will they get out of it? The target audience is really anyone who wants to learn how to use the software. More specifically, though, I did write it with textbook authors and educators in mind, because that is who iBooks Author itself is really designed for. It is not a general ebook creation tool; it is exquisitely tuned for creating a specific family of book-types: textbooks. For use in the classroom and for home study. iBooks Author can be used for creating catalogs and similar books that require lots of images and interactive sidebars associated with the text, but it really is a textbook creation tool. If I were a novelist, I wouldn't choose it as my ebook platform, unless my novel was in the form of a textbook, of course (which could be interesting to try to do). TUAW: Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to talk. It's both a pleasure and an honor to meet you. You bring an amazing history of ebook creation to the table, and I'm sure there are still many stories to share that we didn't have time for. Would you be open to coming back and talking further? Sure. Ebooks are something of a passion of mine. You may have picked up on that! Take Control of iBooks Author (US$15) by Michael E. Cohen is available from Take Control Books. Michael E. Cohen taught English composition, worked as a programmer for NASA's Deep Space Network, and helped develop the first commercial ebooks at the Voyager Company. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
iBook Lessons: Getting Apple reviewers to wake up and pay attention
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. One of our editors suggested I take a look at Holly Lisle's discussion of her issues with the iBookstore review process. Lisle, who writes both fiction and a series of instructional titles for writers, included an in-book link to Amazon in one of her educational ebooks. The topic, in this case, was how to leverage Amazon's site to come up with alternative genres for listing books. Apple's iBookstore reviewers rejected the book, stating the "Rejected Reason(s)" being "Competing Website(s)." She replied by updating her book to redact the problematic links, resubmitting it to Apple. It was rejected again with the explanation, "The original change request was not fulfilled. Your changes were not saved. Original Issues have not been resolved. Please log in to iTunes Connect to view this request and upload replacement assets." Lisle insists she did update the book, and that Apple is wrong. She writes, "As noted, however, I HAD changed the lesson, HAD removed the links, HAD complied with their request. Since the links were gone, their only possible objection-NOT STATED-was content." She decided to pull all her content from the iBookstore. I have attempted to contact her to discuss the matter further. My take on this is that she may have reuploaded the wrong assets, or that the EPUB contained vestigial content, which was detectable by the automated scan. I did not get a reply, so I can't really explain what went wrong in her situation, nor can I offer suggestions specific to this case. (I would love to see the submitted EPUB to dissect it for a full analysis.) Since I am unable to deal with the specifics of her book's rejection, Mike Rose asked that I offer some general advice about the Apple Reviewer/author relationship instead. I have four years of store-based experience under the belt. I have had material rejected, accepted, and escalated. Here are some of the lessons I have learned over time. There are humans at both ends of the situation, even if Apple does not give you access to them. With most businesses, you can expect to call or email and either talk to someone directly or expect a reply within a business day. Apple doesn't work that way. A lot of the App Store/iBookstore experience involves autoreply robots and a vast echoing silence from the Apple end. As an extreme example, I submitted a review variance request for Ad Hoc Helper, an app, in early April. I quickly received standard we-got-your-mail reply. "Thank you for contacting the App Review Team about your app , Ad Hoc Helper. We appreciate you providing us with this information. We will investigate this matter and follow up with you as needed." Since then, nothing. It's been over three months. This is slightly unusual, as normally Apple does reply to queries in a reasonable amount of time. You never know who you are going to get. You never know how much background they have in your area, but someone usually (eventually) replies. You don't know who your someone is going to be. It's more like accessing a call center than working with a personal rep. Although Apple does assign reps for larger companies and offers troubleshooting and concierge services for those premium partners, for little guys and indies, you get whomever is on duty, who picks up your ticket and little else. You are just one product in the midst of their busy work day. What's more, they won't greet you and say, "Hi, my name is Bill, how can I help make your day better?" There's a fundamental power differential at play. Because of this, your communication needs to be courteous and deferential. You cannot make demands; you can make requests. Don't expect to call and get, for example, Verizon or Comcast customer support. This is a vast improvement, by the way, compared to Amazon. Getting an Amazon ticket handled by KDP support works on geological time scales. So keep in mind as you're reading that Apple is by far the preferred experience -- although it's fair to say that Apple has more rules that one might run afoul of. Do as much work for them as you can in your communication, and never assume there is any institutional memory happening. Put all the information a reviewer needs directly in your email and keep your requests succinct. Here is how I would have phrased Ms. Lisle's communication: Dear Apple Review Staff, On (date), I submitted (product). It was rejected for containing a competing website reference. I removed the reference and resubmitted on (date). It was rejected again on (date) for the same reason. My case reference number is (number). I have spot checked my EPUB and can confirm I submitted an edited version. Would you please determine if your validation tools are picking up on any remnants within the file that were manually deleted using (tool, e.g. Pages, or whatever)? I'd like to work with you to ensure that (product) makes it to the iBookstore without any further hitches. Sincerely. The key points in this communication are as follows: It contains a history of the situation, with specific details about what is going on. Further, it assumes the person reading the communication has no other background on this case. It explains the immediate problem at hand and it contains a concrete request that a reviewer can act on. It is short and respectful. These points do not differ much from the best practices for writing any other consumer complaint letter. Further, you should follow up on a regular basis if Apple does not respond, e.g. I'm touching base to check on the status of my previous request, case reference (number). It's important to be proactive, because no one is going to be your advocate other than you. [hat tip to BoingBoing and Hacker News]
iBook Lessons: Picking vendors, price, and exclusivity
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. There's a dilemma faced by many new ebook authors: how to sell a book for "not much at all" and still earn a decent living. Apple and Amazon policies complicate this decision. Amazon offers a multi-choice royalty system (all prices are USD). You can charge up to $2.98 for your ebook and earn 35% of the list price. That equates to just over 34 cents for a $0.99 ebook. charge between $2.99 and $9.99 for your ebook and earn 70% of the list price less delivery costs, which are $0.15 per megabyte. For big illustration-filled books, this can be a deal breaker. TUAW reader Rosie McG's color photo book ships at over 40MB in size. She writes, "With my book priced at $9.99, my net would have been less than zero." charge between $2.99 and $9.99 for your ebook and earn a straight 35% of the list price with no delivery fees. That equates to between $1.05 to $3.49 of earnings. With Apple, you earn a straight 70% royalty on all sales, regardless of price and you can add up to 2GB of content. So long as you deliver in straight EPUB, without using iBooks Author, you can also sell in any other outlet. So there's no question, right? Sell in both places, and just try to make the most of the Amazon situation as best you can, yes? It turns out the situation isn't so simple, especially for new ebook authors. That's because the $0.99-book, which earns you 34 cents at Amazon and 69 cents at Apple, is the workhorse of the new author. It, like its App Store-based compatriot, represents many authors' first step into self-publishing. And Amazon, with its Kindle Direct Publishing arm, has thrown a big monkey wrench into this decision. That's because Amazon has two weapons on its side. First, it's monster presence in the ebook arena. Kindle titles can be read on nearly any platform you throw at it, from iOS to Android, OS X to Windows. That alone gives Kindle books a cachet not found with iBooks. Authors report that the majority of their sales, by quite a margin, come from Amazon. It's not unusual for the Amazon-iBooks split to be closer to 75%-25% than 50%-50%. It's a big incentive to pick Amazon. The second incentive is KDP Select, Amazon's exclusive borrowing program. In exchange for committing your book exclusively to Amazon, your title can be borrowed for free by any Amazon Prime member. Each member may borrow one title per month. If they choose yours, the reward is vast. A $0.99 book that normally earns 34 cents will bring in over $2. This May, the earnings were $2.26 per borrow: over 6 times your normal earnings. (Amazon has not yet announced June earnings. April earnings were $2.48, March $2.18, February $2.01.) To get in on this, you must drop your book from iBooks and any other vendor, and agree to an exclusivity period of 90-days at a time. KDP Select is transformative. It changes your list price from "Do I really want to waste a buck on this book" to "Oh, that book was good, let me pay a little extra to keep it." Psychologically and emotionally, you get to keep that $0.99 list price to entice a value-reward tradeoff from potential buyers, but the real money comes from getting people to give it a try. Both Steve Sande and I have participated in KDP Select since it launched this past winter. And it's been a surprising source of income for a couple of our books (on using the Kindle Fire with 3rd party content and for setting up the device's email). Neither topic was Apple-related and both books outperformed our hopes in terms of earnings for borrows. The $2.99 books, which would earn us under $2 per sale after delivery charges, consistently earn more than $2 per borrow due to the well-funded KDP library pool. And that brings me back to the fundamental question. How would you, yourself, advise a new author to choose given this situation, especially for the $0.99 or $1.99 first title? Would you recommend going for KDP Select exclusivity and borrowing earnings or would you suggest marketing to iBookstore and the other outlets? And, given our TUAW audience and their likely book topics, would writing a book specifically about an Apple-related subject-matter affect that advice, and if so, how? You tell us. Add your comment below and sound off about iBookstore, the KDP Select program, and markets.
iBook Lessons: Adding ASL support to iBooks
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Bilingual books have existed for a long time. Bilingual ebooks have also shown a presence in online stores. Adding American Sign Language (ASL) editions to ebooks? That's a proposition that has been hard to accomplish although possible under current EPUB standards. The reason is that video and text must coexist on the virtual page. That's hard to do with ebooks, and impossible in conventional books. With the iPad and iBooks Author, that challenge has now become possible. Recently, author Adam Stone published his first ASL/English bilingual ebook. Called Pointy Three, it tells the story of a fork that's missing one of its prongs but not, as the description points out, its spirit. The fork journeys through the land of Dinnertime, having adventures and looking for a place where he belongs. The book's possibly unique ASL/English approach offers something new and special. Stone explains that children who use both languages, or who are learning ASL, benefit from this bilingual approach. On his blog, he writes, "[It] is not simply an English story translated into ASL; it is a story created with both languages in mind, swirling around the creative consciousness." His motivation sprang from a desire to let children play with both languages. With iBooks Author, Apple provided the perfect tool for his needs. "I want to show everybody that it can be done easily, quickly, and cheaply," he wrote on his blog. "You don't need to talk to a publisher; you are the publisher." He added in a note to TUAW that "Apple products constantly open new frontiers." I had the pleasure of sitting down with him to discuss his journey into iBooks Author, and talk about how the tool had inspired him. TUAW: So how did you first hear about iBooks Author? And did you immediately think about ASL? Stone: I first heard about it during Apple's education event this past Winter. I'd already been experimenting with American Sign Language ebooks. I was trying to use Composer by Demibooks but I was having a lot of trouble with that particular tool. When I saw the iBooks Author product I immediately knew it was perfect for what I had in mind. I work at P.S. 347 The ASL and English Lower School (it's an ASL/English bilingual school). I use ASL all day so it's always on my mind. (I dedicate the book to the school, in fact - at the end of the book.) iBooks Author looked super easy to use. Obviously video was a prominent part of the iBooks Author presentation. The layout tools looked flexible. And I especially liked how it was already linked to the iBookstore; it meant that publishing it would be easy. TUAW: How did you develop the story for Pointy Three? And did you always intend to be writing for children? Stone: I wanted this book to be a point of inspiration for others. There are a lot of us who are concerned about the lack of ASL/English materials for children and who are thinking of ways to ameliorate that. So this book was first and foremost to set an example -- to tell others, "You can do this too! We all can do this!" I wanted to do a children's book first. I'm already a first grade teacher; I read children's books every day. I think adults should read children's books more often. They really are magical. Pointy Three came to me out of the blue about a week after the Apple presentation. I was sitting on the N train and suddenly I thought of a three-pronged fork. And I typed out the whole story using Notes on my iPhone. It hasn't changed very much since then. I think wanting to belong somewhere is such an universal theme. Any child can relate to that. TUAW: What kind of development effort in terms of hours did it take to build this book? Stone: I think it took me about 40 hours, max. I polished the story and shared it with a couple of friends. Then I found an illustrator, Joyce, and we met a couple of times where she showed me some sketches. Then I connected with Lauren, the ASL storyteller, and we did the whole video shoot in less than three hours in her living room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I sent a rough edit of the video to Joyce and she did the illustrations based off Lauren's telling of the story. The illustrations took about a month and half. That was the longest part of the development process--waiting for them to be done. When I got them, it was just a matter of cleaning them up, adding them into iBooks Author along with the video, laying them out just right with the text and changing the text to match the video and the illustrations. I showed a PDF version to a few people for edits, and then publishing. I started around the middle of February, I think, and finished in mid-June. TUAW: Were there any lessons you learned specifically about shooting video for inclusion in an iBooks Author product? Stone: The interesting thing about having an ASL component is that you can't go back and reshoot the ASL - the signer will look different; the lighting will be different, and so forth. So whatever footage I had, I had to make sure that the English text matched it. There's one part in the book where the ASL version and the English version of a specific sentence are on separate pages. It was a goof made while shooting the video, and I tried to change the English text to match, but it didn't quite work. But that's okay. What is significant in one language may not be as significant in another language. English and ASL are different languages with very different storytelling and cultural properties. But one big lesson I learned - I edited it all in iMovie '09 (or is it '10? whatever the latest version is) and exported it to HD format using Media Browser in the Share menu. Much to my surprise, that format is not compatible with iBooks Author. I had to compress and convert it to "Apple TV" format with a data stream of 2 MBps in 720p - which was perfect. I used MPEG Streamclip. This discussion thread helped a lot. So - that was a big surprise for me - that iMovie couldn't easily export to a format compatible with iBooks Author. No biggie, though. TUAW: Do you worry about the product size? It's over 100MB, about 116MB if I remember correctly, but I think you nicely avoided the problem of a product that was too ginormous. Stone: I knew video would make the iBook big. I experimented with different data stream rates, basically 1 MBps, 1.5, 2, and 3. I found that 2 was perfect. I also wasn't sure just how big the image files could be; each page has about a 1.5-2 MB PNG file for the illustration. TUAW: Did you ever consider doing this project as an application instead? Stone: I have zero app programming skills. To do so would incur lots of overhead costs and stuff like that. I didn't have time for that. I knew all I wanted to do was make a book and iBooks Author fit the bill. I know of other teams working on ASL/English storybook apps, though. Of course I would love to make the book as interactive as I can: let kids play with Pointy Three, move it around the screen and fun stuff like that. But iBooks Author is strictly for making books with interactivity that is very boxed-in in the form of widgets. I see that at the end of conventional iBooks from major publishers: the very last page has a nice widget where you can immediately give a star rating and write a review. I tried to research on how to do the same thing for my book but couldn't find the solution. So my implementation is very clunky: a hyperlink to the book's iTunes Store page. TUAW: Are there any other features you'd put into future books? Stone: Since publishing, I've got some feedback that sound/reading aloud feels missing from the book. People have gotten accustomed to children's books on the iPad speaking aloud. My book is silent - like a normal book, and like any other book I read on the iPad - I'm deaf so reading is always a silent experience. So I didn't really think about that until some people told me they wanted the book to talk aloud to them, too. I'm still researching on how that works. It's not a native feature of iBooks Author, but I heard people have found ways to add read aloud to iBooks. But it sounds difficult. And you know what...it' s interesting because Apple has built in voice over. Why can't Apple allow iBooks readers to access that directly? Seems simple. TUAW: Any more thoughts you want to add about this project? I loved doing it. I want to do more. Surely this isn't Pointy Three's last adventure! Most of all, I hope others do it as well. I told some people, "If you can put together a Powerpoint, you can do this." That's how easy it was. If people are interested in adding ASL support to their books and want to hire me, you can reach me at my blog or Facebook page. I also hang out on Twitter. TUAW: Thank you for taking the time to chat!
iBook Lessons: The absolute beginner
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. I get asked this a lot: what is the absolute minimum it takes to get started in ebook publishing. The answer is this: a manuscript in Microsoft Word .doc or .docx format, an Amazon account, and a smile. Everything else is gravy. With just those items, you can get started publishing on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) system and start earning money from what you write. Just agree to KDP's terms and conditions, provide Amazon with a bank account routing number for your earnings, and if you are an American citizen, a Social Security number. You can find all the information you need to provide on this webpage. You can use a personal account to set up your direct deposit, although you'll probably want to set up a separate business account instead. Check around for whatever free checking deals are currently in your area. These days, in the US, expect to leave a few hundred dollars deposited in the account in order to skip fees. Once you've signed up, you head over to your KDP dashboard to upload and describe your ebook. You won't need an ISBN, you won't need to pre-format your book for mobi or EPUB, you just select the doc file from your desktop, upload it, and let Amazon do all the rest. It's insanely easy. What's more, your Kindle book can be read on nearly any platform out there from iOS to Android, from Mac to Windows. In exchange for selling your book, Amazon takes a fixed 30% of the sales price (which may range from $2.99 to $9.99) off the top plus "delivery fees," which amount to $0.15/megabyte. In other words, Amazon is not the place for you if you intend to sell image-heavy picture books. There are two exceptions to this model. First, if your book costs under $2.99, you must sell it using a flat 35% royalty option (they keep 65% of list price). Second, if you want to bypass the delivery fee model, you may opt into the 35% program for higher-priced ebooks. What if you absolutely need to sell through iBooks? Then, you'll either have to start doing a bit more work in terms of securing an ISBN, filling out paperwork and contracts, and converting to EPUB, or you can look into a third party-Apple approved aggregator. Apple requires: ISBN numbers for the books you want to distribute Delivery in EPUB format, where the book passes EpubCheck 1.0.5 a US Tax ID an iTunes account backed up by a credit card An easy way to work through this is to sell through an agregator like Smashwords. In exchange for a further cut of your profits, they distribute your ebooks to a wide range of stores, including the iBookstore. Instead of earning 70%, you earn 60% and Smashwords handles all the distribution details, including ISBNs. They promise: Free ISBNs Free ebook conversion to nine formats Free unlimited anytime-updates to book and metadata Regardless of where you publish, spend as much time as you can writing a compelling book. And, don't forget the proofreading! [For Federico Viticci, who asked]
iBook Lessons: BookWidgets
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Developer Niels V. has been hard at work developing customizable HTML5 widgets for iBooks Author integration. He and his partner started working on this project when iBooks Author first debuted this past January. Since then, their iBooks Widget creation tool has matured (although it is still not quite ready for sale) and the first book using this technology is now for sale in the iBookstore. The book in question is Ranching and Reading by Dr. Marti Dryk. It's a reading comprehension and vocabulary text. Dr. Dryk's publisher, Bruce Brown of E Skills Learning, contacted Niels after discovering his tool. He was looking specifically for a quiz widget that allowed students to send results to their teachers. Unfortunately, although iBooks Author offers a built-in review widget, it does not provide any communication capabilities. Student answers and performance cannot be sent to teachers. Previously, Brown and his colleagues were involved in publishing education apps. They decided to test out the iBooks waters. "Ranching and Reading" was their first entry into an iBooks alternative to applications. Their primary hurdle, however, was what Brown called "accountability." He explained how teachers needed to know how the students performed on the iBooks quiz. iBooks Widget's quiz widget seemed to be a perfect match. This widget creates quizzes with a variety of question types (including multiple choice, text answers, and picture ordering) and report results to the teacher. The student can immediately review which questions he got right, but he cannot modify his answers. The quiz widget is just one of about eight or nine widgets that Niels has been creating. (He's still in the process of creating more.) Other standouts include an image carousel with Google Maps integration, an interactive graphing plot generator, and an embedded streaming YouTube widget. Although the focus to date has been on education, these tools can be used in any genre of books. The widget creation tool remains in private beta, although Niels has been working with customers like E Skills Learning who have contacted him through his web page. "We're waiting to see how the tools mature," he told TUAW, "to decide when we do our product launch." He does not yet have a fixed date to offer. He invites interested parties to contact him on the website landing page. Niels is responding to queries as he receives them. In addition, he points to his free guide about creating interactive books in iBooks Author. If you sneak a peek at Chapter 6, you'll find a deployed preview of several of these widgets. The goal is to deliver a creation tool that lets you pay (using a credit-based system) to build watermark-free and royalty-free widget exports, which you can then fold directly into your iBooks Author creations, and then upload to the iBookstore without further payment.
