textbooks
Latest
Estimated 350,000 iBooks textbooks downloaded in three days
Apple's textbook endeavor may be off to a better start than anyone expected. According to Global Equities Research, a firm that tracks iBook sales, iTunes customers downloaded over 350,000 textbooks in the first three days of availability. The system also logged 90,000 downloads of iBooks Author, despite lingering questions about licensing and ownership rights of the resulting work. Apple iBooks Author opens a new world of publishing for the education market. As pointed out by Steve Sande in his review of the authoring tool, iBooks Author is designed to help writers produce textbooks. Usually a market reserved for prominent publishers, the tool could open the door for smaller publishers to distribute books or even individual teachers to produce customized content for their students. As someone who homeschool their children, I'm excited to see if curriculum companies embrace this technology. I'm already using the iPad about 30 percent of the time, and would love to use it more often.
iBooks Author: An ebook publisher looks at Apple's textbook creation app
TUAW's Erica Sadun and I are ebook publishers. Late last year, we started up an ebook publishing company -- Sand Dune Books -- and were fortunate to hit a publishing home run right off the bat with our book "Talking to Siri." Since we're familiar with the tools used to create documents for publishing on both the Amazon Kindle bookstore and iBookstore, we were both curious to see what Apple was going to announce on Thursday. The free creation tool, iBooks Author, wasn't a surprise to us, and now that I've had an opportunity to work with the app I thought I'd pass along my thoughts on how it works and why it may not be the publishing tool for everyone. Creating a new book As with Apple's iWork suite, launching iBooks Author initially displays a set of templates that authors and publishers can use right out of the box to create attractively formatted ebooks. That being said, there are only six templates available. Apple's emphasis for iBooks Author is to create a vast library of low-cost textbooks, hence the six templates are all textbook-oriented. For authors who are more interested in publishing other types of fiction or non-fiction books, these six templates can be repurposed. After making changes to a template, the custom template can be saved for future use. Anyone who is familiar with Pages will have few problems working with iBooks Author. The two apps are similar in many ways, with the addition of layout-specific tools. There are widgets -- familiar to users of Apple's ill-fated iWeb -- that add special functions to ebooks. Those functions include interactive galleries, sound or video media, Keynote presentations, interactive review quizzes, interactive images, 3D rotatable images, and HTML code. For each template, there is a very complete set of paragraph, character and list styles that can be applied to text with a click. New styles can be generated and added to the template as well. In addition, there are a number of page layouts available. The layouts include Chapters, Sections, copyright, dedication, and forward pages, blank pages, and 1 through 3 column pages. Placeholders appear on each layout, and with a click you can replace the boilerplate with your own text or images. Like the iWorks apps, iBooks Author has excellent integration with iTunes, iPhoto, and GarageBand for importing media into your project. Text can be wrapped around the images, and frames, masks, and shadows applied to the images to give them depth on a page. I love the glossary tools that are built into iBooks Author. It's easy to highlight a term, define it as a glossary entry, and then write a definition for the term. The term becomes a link that the reader can click on to see the definition. iBooks Author lets you toggle between portrait and landscape orientations to see what the end product is going to look like on an iPad. There's also a tethered preview feature that moves the book to your iPad for on-device previewing of text, graphics, and the special features. Speaking of those special features, the included widgets are all rather handy for textbook authors. The review widget can be used to create useful quizzes. There are four different styles of multiple choice questions, and two where the students need to move a label or image to the appropriate location. The gallery widget lets authors add galleries of photos pertaining to a subject. In the image below, I've created a gallery showing three of the Apple executives. Users can swipe through the images. One of the other widgets that could end up being quite useful is the HTML widget. I used this extensively to work around some of iWeb's missing features, and was able to add web forms, online stores, and other items to websites. Can you imagine being able to put an open-book exam into a textbook, allowing students to take the exam through the book with the results going to an online database? Cool. Authors can also embed fully-functioning Keynote presentations and movies into their books. All of this content can be previewed by opening iBooks 2 on the iPad and then connecting the device to a Mac running iBooks Author. If changes are made to the ebook in iBooks Author, you need to click the preview button in the app one more time to refresh the changes; it doesn't happen automatically. iBooks Author follows a familiar format for textbooks, with chapters, sections, and pages. It adds commonly used pages like dedications and copyright info, and when these pages are inserted into an iBook using the tool, it automatically adds them to the table of contents. If I have one complaint about iBooks Author, it's that it doesn't really lend itself too well to collaborations. It would be nice if two authors could both work on a single document at the same time. Instead, the document needs to be "checked out" to the appropriate parties, one at a time. Publishing For publishers who are thinking about putting their ebooks into both the iBookstore and the Amazon Kindle Bookstore, iBooks Author throws a monkey wrench into the works. iBooks Author's book format is specific to iBooks 2; you can't directly republish your book to work in the Kindle Bookstore. That's not really too different from the way things were before iBooks Author came out. For ebooks that Erica and I have published through Sand Dune Books, we wrote the original books in Microsoft Word. When publishing to the Kindle Bookstore, we simply uploaded the file to Kindle Direct Publishing and the .docx file was converted to work in the Kindle Reader. To publish to the iBookstore, we imported the Word document into Pages, made formatting changes where necessary, and then exported the book as an EPUB. Some additional work was required in Calibre to get the book into shape for the iBookstore. I won't go through the steps required to get a book published on the Kindle Bookstore, but note that it is much easier than getting a book into the iBookstore. For that, you need to have an iBookstore seller account, have a copy of iTunes Producer to take the iTunes Store package created by iBooks Author and publish it into the iBookstore, and have an active contract. You also need to have a bank account set up to receive proceeds through electronic payment, an ISBN for each title, and a US tax ID. Apple is now requiring authors to create a sample book that customers can download and view for free. This is a new requirement that's part of the publishing process. If you decide that you don't want to publish your book through the iBookstore, you can export the book in iBooks or PDF format for self-distribution. As you have probably already heard, Apple surprised authors in the iBooks Author License Agreement. The wording that caught everyone off guard was in section 2 of the agreement: B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows: (i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means; (ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution. It appears from reading this that if you wish to sell your iBooks Author-created tome through the iBookstore, then you cannot sell it through any other bookstore -- including the Amazon Kindle Bookstore. Quite a few web notables have decried this, but Amazon is also pulling stunts to try to keep publishers from putting their work into other bookstores. A good example of this is the Kindle Select program, in which authors who agree to keep their works specific to the Kindle bookstore can have their books distributed through the Kindle Lending Library program. With this program, Amazon Prime customers can borrow the books at no cost, and the author still gets paid a token amount (in December, 2011, each borrow was worth $1.70). So what's an author or publisher to do if he or she wants to have distribution in both the Kindle Bookstore and the iBookstore? Easy -- you just don't use iBooks Author to create the book. This means that your iBooks won't be able to have many of the nifty features that iBooks Author allows you to use, but you will be able to distribute your work for a fee in any ebook store. I think a lot of non-authors and publishers are whining about the iBooks Author License Agreement, when they really don't understand that it's just saying that you can't sell works created with iBooks Author in any bookstore. You can create ebooks using other methods and sell them anywhere. Conclusion Let me reiterate one key point: iBooks Author is designed for creating textbooks. If you're thinking about using it for other types of books, you can -- but understand that this app may not necessarily be the tool you're looking for if you want to create and sell books on all ebook platforms. iBooks Author does a great job at what it's designed for, and I think we'll see a lot of incredibly interactive books hitting the iBookstore in the near future. Is it perfect? No. But for a first release of a new app, it's pretty darned close.
Why McGraw-Hill is selling iBooks for $15
The announcement this morning that textbooks would be sold through the iBookstore wasn't especially surprising. But the price was; full-featured multimedia electronic textbooks being offered for no more than US$15 is exactly the kind of disruptive shakeup the industry needed. While only the K-12 education market is on board so far, I'm looking forward to a future where universities sign up too, and students' book costs drop from the nearly $1000 dollars a year I paid as an undergrad to much more reasonable and manageable levels. One question on many people's minds has been how Apple and the textbook publishers were able to agree on such a low pricing scheme for textbooks. After all, high school textbooks usually cost $75 each, and thus far publishers haven't been well-known for offering electronic versions of published works at a discount; in fact, in a lot of cases ebooks have cost more than their paper versions despite presumably lower distribution and production costs. So, not that anyone's complaining, why the lower prices? AllThingsD asked that question of McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw, and it turns out to have a simple answer. Schools will usually hold onto the paper versions of textbooks for about five years, meaning the publishers are only recouping about $15 per year anyway. Via the iBookstore, textbooks can be sold directly to students (who may or may not be offered payment vouchers from their schools), and from the publishers' perspective, the beauty of this arrangement is that those books can't be re-used or re-sold. After Apple takes its 30 percent cut, publishers will only take $10.50 from a $15 textbook sale, but that's $10.50 they can get from every student, every year, and without the heavy production and distribution costs associated with making and shipping the often giant-sized paper versions of textbooks. It's obviously too early to tell whether this will work out to be a lucrative arrangement for textbook publishers, but just looking at the way the numbers shake out, at the very least it seems that, contrary to initial appearances, $15 isn't such a shockingly low price for textbooks after all.
Apple iBooks 2 textbooks video walkthrough and screenshots (hands-on)
We had a few minutes to browse through iBooks 2 textbooks following Apple's press conference this morning, but now we have a fully-loaded iPad 2 to play with, so we decided to spend some more time getting educated in the comfort of our in-house studio. You already had a chance to get familiar with the new app and associated media earlier today, so this time it's all about the visuals. Browse through the galley below as we explore Life on Earth before taking a front seat in Biology and getting our hands dirty with Frog Dissection. And if you're feeling brave, there's a juicy video walkthrough just past the break.
Apple posts video of education event
Apple has posted a video of the education event it held earlier today. The video is available for streaming on Apple's site, or you can download a higher quality version from iTunes. This is Apple's first public event since October's introduction of the iPhone 4S. In this video you'll see the debut of iBooks 2.0, iBooks Author, the iTunes U app, and Apple's partnership with textbook publishers to offer electronic textbooks directly to students for just US$14.99.
Apple's education announcement: what you need to know
Today's education event was a reasonably small one, so far as Apple pressers go, held at the Guggenheim museum in New York City, with a smattering of media representatives in attendance. It arrives on the tails of some already hearty numbers for the company, including the existence of 20,000 learning-themed apps and 1.5 million iPads currently in use for education. But Cupertino's plans for the future of learning are grand indeed, including the desire to "reinvent the textbook" via iBooks 2. And while our expectations weren't particularly grandiose going into this morning, we were, indeed, pretty impressed with what we saw. So, what did you miss if you happened to sleep in late today? Find out, after the break.
Apple's iBooks 2 e-textbooks pack tons of info, take up tons of your iPad's memory
Apple just got done unveiling its new iBooks 2 platform, letting us in on its plan to revamp education (in part) through its fancy new e-textbooks. These digital volumes look beautiful and come at a relatively meager monetary cost ($14.99), but a quick perusal of the textbooks available in iTunes reveals they'll take a sizable chunk of your iPad's memory. The current lineup of eight texts range in size from 800MB to 2.77GB, so folks looking to grab a full semester's worth of materials may have to carry an extra iPad or three to get the job done. Not an ideal solution, but a few Apple slates are still easier to schlep across campus than those massive texts you're used to, right?
Apple iTunes U hands-on (video)
Would you like to make more money? Sure, we all would, and a great way to do that is to get a better education. There was a time when you had to go to schools or rely on shady mail-order diplomas. Now you can use your iPad and get the same thing with the new iTunes U app. It's an extension of the existing iTunes U service, which has been around for about four years despite few people knowing anything about it. This new apps should change that. Join us for a full exploration of why.
Apple iBooks 2 textbook hands-on (video)
We just got our first opportunity to get our hands on one of Apple's new interactive textbooks and we have to say, they're as good as they looked during the live event. We tried a few titles, ranging from steady textbooks to more exotic stuffs, but by far the best is the selection from E.O. Wilson called Life on Earth. Join us for full details and video demonstration of the future of learning after the break.
iBooks 2 showcased with preview of E.O. Wilson biology textbook
As part of today's education announcement, you can pick up a preview of the biology textbook book E. O. Wilson's Life on Earth as a free download from the iTunes store. Requirements for this title are an iPad running iOS 5 and the latest iBooks version, the newly released iBooks 2. Parts of this textbook were demoed during the event this morning. Included in this preview release is a demonstration of a virtual cell which students can zoom into, a step by step explanation of cell division (accompanied by footage), and a guided tour of a nature preserve. New chapters of the book will be released in the spring, and eventually the entire book will be available to students (or people interested in biology) everywhere. Final pricing is not yet known.
Apple revamps iTunes U and intros dedicated app (video)
A facelift for iBooks wasn't the only change on Apple's agenda today, as the company's SVP Eddy Cue has just announced an overhaul of iTunes U. The service, mostly used as a means of delivering lectures to college students, has seen over 700 million downloads since its launch and is now gearing up to offer full online courses from the likes of Duke University, Yale, MIT, amongst others.As an example of this new remote method of learning, the company demoed a Chemistry course at its event, showing an overview, syllabus, credits and even the professor's office hours. Tabs are placed along the right side of page with options for Info, Posts, Notes and Materials, allowing teachers to send updates direct to the app and students the ability to jot down important highlights. Wondering about integration? A simple tap on these pushed assignments will transport students direct to iBooks, where their specific coursework lies in wait and, once completed, can be crossed off on the provided task list.The app can even be used for course registration, eliminating the frenzied rush typically associated with such events. It's all available to download on the App Store right now at no cost in 123 countries. So, if you're on Apple's participating list of schools and you're rocking an iPad, go ahead and get to virtually cracking those books.Update: We've got our hands-on video up of the new iTunes U application!
Apple to bring interactive textbooks to the iPad with iBooks 2 (Updated)
Today is Apple's big education event and the company kicked off its announcements with iBooks 2, which will bring a new textbook experience to the iPad. As expected, these textbooks will include standard text interspersed with interactive high-quality images, videos, animations and 3-D models. This content will be more than pretty; it will provide students with an immersive learning environment. They will be able to pinch to zoom on images, tap on a word and read the glossary entry to find out what they are looking at. It will also include "My Notes" which will let you easily create study cards from a section of the textbook. The first textbooks made available will be biology and high school science titles from Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. These publishers make up 90 percent of the textbook market. DK Publishing will also launch with several interactive titles for children. Pricing is amazingly competitive with high school textbooks costing $14.99 or less. The new iBooks 2 should be available for free from the iOS App Store starting later today is now available in the App Store. You can see a sample of what these textbooks will look like via E.O. Wilson's Life On Earth.
Apple announces free iBooks Author OS X app for publishing books to the App Store
We're here at Apple's education-themed event at the Guggenheim museum in New York City, and the company's just followed up its long-awaited textbook announcement with something unexpected: iBooks Author, a free OS X program for creating books. The intent is really for teachers and other educators to produce educational materials, but Apple says the format can apply to any genre. Aside from the free part, the real story here is ease of use, with the ability to drag and drop photos, videos and even Microsoft Word files into various templates. If you use Apple's own suite of office apps, in particular, you can drag and drop a Keynote presentation into the doc, and it'll live on as an interactive widget. (You can whip up other widgets, too, though you'll need to know Javascript or HTML.) Moving beyond the main text, authors can also arrange glossaries by highlighting and clicking words, and clicking again to add a definition. In a surprise move, Apple also said authors can publish straight to the store, though we're waiting for clarification that textbook writers and other scribes are actually exempt from Cupertino's notorious approval process. In any case, the app is available now in the App Store (for OS X Lion only, sadly) so you can cracking on that definitive Kurt Vonnegut glossary you never knew you had in you. Update: We've got our hands-on up! Update 2: Apple has confirmed some key approval and revenue-sharing details. First, authors will be subject to the same App Store approval process as developers. Writers can offer their books for free, or for as much as $14.99 -- the same price cap for textbooks sold in the store. And, like developers, authors must agree to a 70/30 revenue split, with writers pocketing 70 percent after Apple takes its share.
Apple launches iBooks 2 e-Textbook platform (video)
We're here at Apple's education-flavored event at the Guggenheim museum in New York City. Phil Schiller has just taken to the stage and announced the first half of Apple's platform that's going to "reinvent the textbook:" iBooks 2. Saying that there were 1.5 million iPads currently in use in Education (using 20,000 specific apps), the revamped book-stand now includes education-specific features to help the budding students of the world. You'll be able to paw through content, stopping to flick through detailed 3D animated models of elements within, access video and definitions without leaving the page. VP of Productivity Applications, Roger Rosner said that "Clearly, no printed book can compete with this:" given the constantly-updated data available, that's kinda obvious. Still, you'll be able to read in a text-heavy portrait or picture-biased landscape mode and there's also the option to have random pop-quizzes appear to keep you on your toes. Annotations is an integral part of the system: you can add stickies to individual pages and aggregate them into virtual 3 x 5-inch note-cards for revision during finals. You'll also get the same purchase, download and re-download rights you enjoy in the company's other stores. The company's partnered (initially) with textbook makers Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, as the trio are responsible for 90 percent of all textbooks sold -- as well as DK and the E.O. Wilson Foundation. Phil was gushing, saying that he couldn't "overemphasize the importance of these partners working with us." Pearson's High School Science, Biology, DK's Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life, Natural History Insects, Animals and My First ABC as well as the first two chapters of E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth will be available at launch -- the latter is free. You'll be able to download iBooks 2 from the app store free of charge, whilst textbooks themselves will cost $14.99 or less : a far cry from the $80 dead-tree textbooks we shelled out for in college. Update: We've got a hands-on up live from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City!
Live from Apple's education event!
Ready to get smart in the Big Apple? We are, and so is Apple. Since announcing today's event we've heard talk of a focus on digital books and personal publishing tools. Basically, Apple's looking to do to the textbook publishing market what it did to the music industry with iTunes. Is today a day that will change history for trees worldwide? Join us as we find out. We'll be starting at the time below. January 19, 2012 10:00 AM EST
Bloomberg: Apple plans to bolster iPad use in schools
Bloomberg adds yet another dollop of confirmation to the rumors about tomorrow's event that Apple will have plenty of educational news to share. Most of the rumors have revolved around a textbook-based system for iBooks, and Bloomberg agrees, saying that Apple will introduce not only more textbook integration for iBooks, but new tools that will allow lots more authors and publishers to release materials directly. It sounds, according to the two anonymous Apple insiders quoted, like Apple's looking to bypass the standard textbook publishers completely by implementing an App Store-style model, which will come with the added bonus of providing tons and tons of quickly updated educational information on its mobile devices. This would mean that not only can people who want to publish textbooks of their own do so, but teachers can even write and publish their own materials directly, without worrying about sending students out to find a specific textbook printing or being able to afford often quite expensive costs. It's fair to say that Apple helped change the way software was distributed through its App Store (mobile software for certain), and if these rumors are true, it could be looking to do the same with educational materials. Sounds interesting! The event kicks off tomorrow at 10am Eastern in New York City. We'll be providing live coverage and lots of insight afterwards as usual.
TUAW TV Live at 5 PM ET: The pre-show show of shows
There's lots to talk about on TUAW TV Live this afternoon -- tomorrow is the early morning Apple education event, next Tuesday we'll hear all about how well Apple did in their first quarter earnings call, and next Thursday is opening day of Macworld | iWorld 2012. That means there's plenty of time for speculation over the next week, so why not get an early start with the craziness on today's TUAW TV Live show? As usual, I'll be starting the show at 5 PM EDT (2 PM PDT / 10 PM BST) sharp, and we'll take a few minutes to chat before the demos start. To join in on the chat and watch the live streaming video, drop by TUAW about five minutes before the start time to get your instructions on how to participate. If you're unable to join us for the show, remember that you can always subscribe to the video podcast and watch the show at your leisure in iTunes or any other favorite podcatching app. The past shows are also available on the TUAW YouTube channel. The chat is now available as well on IRC: join us on server chat1.ustream.tv, chat room #tuaw-tv.
Tomorrow's Apple event to focus on digital textbook publishing tools, says Bloomberg
We've already seen some rumors about what Apple has in store for its education-minded announcement in New York City tomorrow, and now Bloomberg is out with a report of its own that backs up some of those earlier rumblings and offers a few new details. Citing two people with knowledge of the announcement, it says that the main focus of the event will be a set of tools that will "make it easier to publish interactive textbooks and other digital educational content." That not only includes tools for the big textbook publishers, but self-publishers as well -- Bloomberg gives the example of teachers preparing materials for that week's lesson, or scientists and historians who could publish professional-looking content without a publishing deal. According to Bloomberg's sources, Apple is expected to use a modified version of the ePub standard for the content, and it's main focus is said to be the K-12 market. In case you needed a reminder, we'll be there live to report on the announcement as it happens -- the event gets underway tomorrow at 10AM Eastern.
What to expect from Apple's education event: Digital textbooks, 'GarageBand for ebooks'
The Wall Street Journal and Ars Technica have weighed in with information about Apple's upcoming education event. Both outlets cite the usual "people familiar with the matter" for their information, and their sources have generally given accurate info in the past. With those caveats out of the way, it's worth looking at what the WSJ and Ars have to say about Thursday's event. The Wall Street Journal confirms most of the past week's speculation and says Apple's education event will indeed focus on the launch of a new platform for digital textbooks. According to its sources, Apple has been working with textbook publishers on this new platform for quite some time; McGraw-Hill has been collaborating with Apple since at least June of 2011. Cengage Learning, a major player in textbooks for higher education, has worked with Apple in the past and will also attend the event. Reportedly the event will focus on a new type of digital textbook providing a greater degree of interactivity than has been offered in the past. The iPad is of course the perfect medium for consumption of such content, and the iTunes Store is a ready-made outlet for delivering that content. Apple has already provided all the tools for digital textbooks to get into the hands of teachers and students, with one exception: an easy way to create that digital content in the first place. Tools for creating ebooks from scratch or converting standard books into digital versions have traditionally been confusing to use, delivered inconsistent results, and haven't played well with anything more than basic multimedia integration. Speaking from my personal experience in trying to create a simple text-only ebook using iWork, I've longed for a simpler and more user-friendly tool; I can only imagine that textbook publishers have been clamoring for such a piece of software even more stridently. According to Ars Technica, Apple is set to deliver that final piece of the puzzle in crafting digital textbooks, which the site characterizes as sort of a "GarageBand for ebooks." Apple is expected to announce support for the EPUB 3 standard -- it currently supports EPUB 2 with some HTML5-based extensions to allow grafting of basic multimedia content onto ebooks. While this may render such ebooks incompatible with other ebook platforms (Kindle, most notably) it should also make it much easier for textbook makers to deliver interactive content in their ebooks. Both Ars's sources and people within the digital publishing industry agree that Apple is set to introduce a tool designed to make the process of creating digital content for ebooks as easy as GarageBand makes it to throw together a song on your Mac. While this lowering of the barrier for publishing could have some unintended consequences (I shudder to think that these kinds of tools might mean my ex-girlfriend's Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction might reach a wider audience), the implications for bigger publishers like the major players in the textbook market are disruptive -- and lucrative. If The Wall Street Journal and Ars have it right, Thursday's event looks like a fairly big deal despite the lack of any new hardware. For the past 25 years (at least) we've been promised that technology would eventually revolutionize the classroom entirely, but it's only recently that the tools and means of delivery have existed to supplement or supplant the traditional dead-tree textbook. It sounds like that might be coming to pass at last.
Apple announces Jan. 19 event at Guggenheim in NYC
Apple has sent out invitations to various media outlets, including The Loop, to attend an event centering on education at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on Jan. 19. The event is expected to focus on iTunes U and electronic textbooks and has been in the works since late September. At least two project announcements are expected, according to various rumors. Steve Jobs was reportedly intimately involved in the project prior to his death.
