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Apple unveils new version of iBooks with continuous scrolling, iBooks Author also updated
Apple CEO Tim Cook took to a San Jose theater stage today to unveil a new version of the company's literature-based digital storefront, iBooks. Cook says it integrates better with iCloud, allows for quote sharing on Facebook and Twitter, and has support for "over 40 languages." Beyond the app update info, Cook touted iBook's sales exceeding 400 million books worldwide -- not too shabby! The updated iBooks app should be available today on the iOS App Store, though it's not there just yet. Update: It looks like iBooks Author is also getting an update today, as Cook says new templates, fonts, and user-created fonts are now supported. Additionally, mathematical equations can now be inserted directly, and multitouch widgets will also work. For more coverage, visit our Apple Special Event hub!
iBookstore lines its shelves with paid content in New Zealand, 17 Latin American countries
iDevice owners in New Zealand and 17 Latin American countries are no longer restricted to a diet composed of free content when it comes to their respective iBookstores. A quick search of the storefronts will reveal virtual shelves stocked with paid-content that haven't yet found their way to the shops' homepages. Reside in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru or Venezuela? Head on over to the appropriate store and books with price tags will be available for purchase. If this is any sign of what Apple has up its sleeve for tomorrow, we suspect that "a little more" will involve a bit of reading.
Paid iBookstore content now live in New Zealand, 17 other countries
It looks like e-book lovers around the world can definitely look forward to tomorrow's expected iPad mini reveal, as paid iBookstore content has just gone live in 17 new countries. If a smaller iPad is indeed in the cards -- and we're pretty sure it is -- it will compete directly with Amazon's Kindle line. Expanding the company's e-book offerings might be a good indication of how Apple will angle its announcement to appeal to would-be Kindle buyers. The full list of countries getting refreshed iBookstore content is as follows: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela. This news also matches up nicely with the recent discovery of titles in the iBookstore referencing the as-yet unannounced iBooks 3.0 platform in their descriptions. Apple launching a smaller iPad with a focus on reading and education is something our own Erica Sadun is already betting on, and these two clues seem to support that theory quite nicely.
Amazon, Apple customers to get credits for price-fixed e-books
E-book buyers who unwittingly fell victim to the much publicized price-fixing scheme to universally raise the cost of popular digital reading materials will soon receive a credit for their troubles. Both Amazon and Apple have started distributing emails to customers who can expect a credit. Apple hasn't detailed the amount of the credits, but Amazon notes each qualifying e-book purchase should return between 30 cents and $1.32. The monetary bonus comes courtesy of a settlement reached earlier this year between the Department of Justice and a trio of publishers including Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Hachette Book Group. A $69 million fund with which to pay out the credits will be created by the three publishers that decided to settle. The settlement itself remains pending until approved by the court in February. Publishers Macmillan and Penguin, as well as Apple itself, have decided not to settle and will head to court to plead their cases in June 2013.
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.
Apple says it will stop e-book price fixing in Europe
In a move that looks hopeful for the American market, Apple has vowed to stop fixing e-book prices in Europe, Macworld reports. As part of the agreement, Apple will terminate the agency-pricing agreements with the five companies involved in the European antitrust suit: Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and MacMillan. Apple first offered to settle in April. As part of the settlement, Apple said it will allow retailers to set e-book prices in European markets for two years. Despite a partial deal being reached in the US, Apple is still part of the ongoing antitrust suit here.
Apple updates nearly every app for iOS 6, sneaks in key GarageBand, iPhoto and Podcasts updates
If you didn't already know that iOS 6 was out in the wild, Apple just delivered a torrent of mobile app updates to make it perfectly clear. Virtually every app that isn't preloaded now has explicit iOS 6 support to keep it running smoothly, and some of the upgrades are thankfully more than just skin-deep compatibility tweaks. Among the highlights are Podcasts' new subscription list syncing through iCloud, ringtone creation with GarageBand and iPhoto support for 36.5-megapixel image editing on the latest devices -- you know, for that moment you need to tweak Nikon D800 photos on an iPhone 5. We're including direct links to a few of the juicier updates, but we'd recommend checking AppleInsider's comprehensive list to see everything that you're missing.
$69 million ebook settlement reached with three publishers, Apple remains in suit
Three of the publishers involved in the antitrust suit levied by the U.S. Department of Justice against Apple and others have officially reached a settlement, with $69 million going to consumers as a result, Baltimore's ABC 2 reported on Thursday. Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster will issue the payouts and agreed to terminate agency pricing contracts with publishers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This pricing model, which mirrors Apple's 70-30 revenue split with software developers on the App Store, includes a "most favored nation" clause that blocked Amazon from discounting bestselling ebooks below cost as it moved to secure its overwhelming share of the ebook market. ABC 2 said Apple, along with Amazon, Google, Sony, Barnes & Noble and Kobo, agreed to contact eligible customers via email and that the amount issued will either be a check or credit toward future purchases. The amount of restitution is varied by state and affects books sold under the agency model by all five publishers (the above publishers plus Penguin and Macmillan, called the "Agency Five") between April 1, 2010, and May 21, 2012. A couple of weeks ago, Apple blasted the proposed settlement, which involves renegotiating contracts with the publishers, saying it was unfair and unlawful. The trial against those who remain in the antitrust suit -- Penguin, Macmillan and Apple -- is scheduled to begin in June 2013. The settlement will go into effect 30 days after being approved by a federal judge. [Via The Verge]
Apple adds support options for iBookstore publishers
In very welcome news to iBookstore publishers, Apple has recently added some support options to make it easier to get answers about pesky issues that might be delaying the sale of the next Great American Novel. In a letter to iBookstore publishers last week, Apple outlined four different support options. First, the Book Forum is part of the Apple Support Communities and a great way to search for answers to questions that others may have already asked. There's also an FAQ for iTunes Connect (requires iTunes Connect account to log in), the tool that's used to submit books to the store. For additional assistance with iTunes Connect issues, an existing Contact Us module leads publishers through a guided set of questions to provide an FAQ answer. Should that not provide an answer, there's now a toll-free (U.S. and Canada) number available to speak directly to an iBookstore Publisher Support advisor. Apple recommends that publishers have information on hand before requesting support by email or phone, including the Apple ID, ISBN, or vendor ID and title, the transfer log for iTunes Producer delivery failures, and the device, browser, version number, and operating system for technical issues in the iBookstore or on iTunes Connect.
Apple calls Dept. of Justice settlement proposal unlawful
Apple is making it known that it will not accept the ebook settlement terms proposed by the Department of Justice, says a report in Paid Content. Under the DOJ's proposal, Apple would have to sever its current contracts and renegotiate new ones with three book publishers - HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster. Apple says that this outcome is "fundamentally unfair, unlawful, and unprecedented" and denies the company its right to a fair trial. This settlement is the result of an investigation into Apple's agency model pricing agreement with book publishers. In this model, publishers are allowed to set ebook prices in the iBookstore and cannot sell the electronic books at a lower price through another retailer. This hurt Amazon, which was paying publishers the wholesale cost, but selling the books to customers at extremely low prices, often at a loss. Rather than accept the settlement, Apple asked the court to defer judgement on the settlement until the case made its way through the court. The trial is expected to begin in June 2013. [Via Apple Insider]
Apple may become the new sponsor of the UK's Orange Prize for Fiction
The Orange Prize for Fiction is a prestigious literary award in the UK that goes to one outstanding female writer every year. Until this past May the award, officially called the Women's Prize for Fiction, has been sponsored by UK telecoms provider Orange. However, after T-Mobile's merger with Orange earlier this year, the company decided to drop its sponsorship of the prize. Now, according to The Sunday Telegraph, Apple is looking to take over sponsorship of the literary award. The Telegraph story points out that UK sponsorship by Apple is a rare thing. The Cupertino company has only lent its "iTunes" name to a music festival and an iTV2 music show. But the paper speculates that Apple's presumed interest in the literary prize is to drum up more interest in reading ebooks from its iBookstore. In fact, instead of just switching fruit names from Orange to Apple, should it win the sponsorship, Apple might forgo the "Apple Prize for Fiction" name all together and could presumably call it the "iBooks Prize for Fiction." The company could then also promote the prize through the iBookstore. The Sunday Telegraph doesn't provide many more details besides their sources confirming that "Apple has had talks with the award organisers" and that also "a number of companies, including Kobo, the ebook producer, had also indicated their interest but that discussions with Apple were the most advanced." The Orange Prize for Fiction originated in 1996. You can see a full list of winners here.
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]
iBooks gets its first DC Comics title: Batman: Earth One
DC Comics has been publishing titles on the iPad for a while now, both in the official DC Comics app and in the Comixology app (which, as you may know, actually produces the official app anyway). But DC is now finally turning to iBooks to sell comics as well, with an iBooks version of the Batman: Earth One story that passed through the official Batman lines recently. This is DC's first title on the iBookstore, and it joins a slew of Marvel titles, as well as quite a few independent titles already selling comics in this way. Most of the "big" line titles in the iBookstore are trade paperbacks -- bigger collections of Marvel and other titles that combine more than one monthly comic together. But that's not necessarily the only option out there: Some companies have released single issues on the iBookstore, available for just a buck or two per issue. Because the market is so open, these companies can do whatever they want. Obviously, releasing titles in this way helps comic companies dodge the extra fees behind using Comixology's software to sell their books, but then again they miss out on Comixology's significant audience and discovery features that bring in new readers to old and obscure books. These days, comics companies will likely try whatever they can to sell these digital copies, and we'll see which method works best in the future.
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: 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]
E-book price fixing court date set for 2013
The Justice Department has been ready to take Apple to task over these recent allegations of e-book price fixing, and now a court date has been set: Apple will have to face the music almost a year from now, on June 3, 2013. Apple, Macmillan and the Penguin Group are the targets in the case, and while each of them has denied any formal price-fixing in the past, the court will do a little formal digging into those claims. A year is quite a long ways away, but stay tuned and we'll see exactly what case the Justice Department plans to lay out against Apple and the other publishing companies then. [via Engadget]
iBook Lessons: Can an iBooks-only strategy work?
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. One question I keep encountering is this: "If iBooks Author is so great, can I make enough money selling only through Apple and only to iPad owners to stay in business?" The answer to that is that results will vary. Can you add enough value in an iBooks Author presentation to justify leaving out a large segment of the ebook market? Using proprietary formats, the iBooks Author app allows you to lay out your books and add custom elements in ways that go well beyond the EPUB standard. Your books look exactly as you intend them to; you can build interactive widgets that leverage the power of HTML and Javascript for new kinds of interaction. This extended standard means that iBooks Author excludes Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook platforms, and it also cuts away anyone who might purchase and read your ebook on an iPhone or iPod touch. iBooks Author in its current state is Apple only and iPad only. [Note that you're free to repurpose your text, images and other content for those other platforms if you want to build Kindle/Nook-friendly editions. The iBooks Author licensing agreement says you can't sell the output from iBooks Author anywhere but the Apple iBookstore, but your content is yours and you can use other tools to build for other ebook platforms. –Ed.] That's not the entire picture, however. For some authors, specifically those creating highly-interactive titles, their choice hasn't really been about Amazon-or-iBooks, since standard EPUB represents a fairly static output technology. Their decision is more about choosing between an iBooks Author ebook versus a custom, standalone iPad app. I have encountered book creators who have gone in both directions. iOS development house Tapity chose to go iBooks. Founder Jeremy Olson told me, "To build an interactive digital book, our choice of platforms was really straightforward. Kindle doesn't yet allow the kind of rich interaction that we were looking to build so it was really between building an app versus building an iBook. When iBooks Author was announced in January, the choice was a no-brainer: It's pretty simple: cost to build, time to build, price you can charge, and less competition." Tapity's first entry to this field was Cleaning Mona Lisa. An interactive iBook, it introduced readers to painting techniques and the need for restoration. Host Lee Sandstead offers a series of enthusiastic lectures about the topic through embedded videos. Interactive widgets guide readers through virtual "cleaning" exercises, revealing the hidden colors and details hidden by the debris of time. "As a team of creatives, building Cleaning Mona Lisa with iBooks Author cost us next to nothing but our time," Olson said. "Just a few thousand dollars. I expect building an app with the same kind of user experience could have cost us close to a hundred thousand dollars to contract out the programming. This makes building iBooks far less risky than building apps." He pointed out how effective this choice was. "Programming a project generally consumes half or more of the development time. With iBooks Author, we design it and it's done (apart from just a few small HTML 5 widgets we had to program). This also cuts out the process of designing something in Photoshop and exporting it for use in an app." Going iBooks also helped sustain the book's bottom line for sales. "With apps, $2.99 is a premium price. With books, folks expect to pay more and so $2.99 was an extremely reasonable starting price for our book. With future books we think that we can even charge much more. With higher prices we don't have to worry about the volume so much." Monster Costume CEO Kyle Kinkade opted for a custom app instead. Having debuted in the ebook scene with the highly popular Bartleby's Book of Buttons, Monster Costume is known for producing high-quality, extremely interactive titles with a strong attention to detail. "We do books as applications," he explained, "Because, frankly, there's no platform that's mature enough yet to support the kind of interaction we create. If iBooks Author could produce the level of what we wanted it to do, we'd use it in a heartbeat. The problem is that it can't handle the demands we put on an interactive book." For Monster Costume, iBooks Author's Keynote-esque toolset -- intended for ease of use and book production by non-programmers -- doesn't deliver the level of interactivity or customizability needed. The company builds its own proprietary book development tools in-house. "We can handle logic way better than iBooks Author, and we can handle high-level scripting," Kinkade said. "We provide finely detailed interaction as well. We can adjust ourselves and our engines to a much higher level of graphical horsepower, too. In comparison, iBooks doesn't provide the horsepower or the finesse that we need for our projects." Monster Costume is currently working on The Adventures of Tyler Washburn. Kinkade told TUAW, "For Washburn, the title we're building now, we just couldn't have done it in iBooks. That degree of graphics and interaction simply does not exist in the tools that Apple has provided." Economically, building in-house tools has been an investment in the future. "The cost of development for our engine was extremely high," Kinkade explained. "Using that engine for future titles will be at a far lower cost now that we've created it. We are in talks with various content producers and publishing companies right now to license those tools, to let them do what we do." Choosing to go in or out of the iBookstore represents another point of difference between developers. For Olson, iBooks is a positive. "The iBookstore is a new marketplace and iBooks Author books are an even newer phenomenon. That means that Apple loves to promote great examples of innovation on the platform and it's easier to get on their radar. It also takes fewer sales to get high up in the charts," he said. "So did we make the right choice? Absolutely. No regrets. Our iBook peaked at the #12 book in the iBookstore and was the #1 app in Arts & Entertainment for over two weeks. Sales are definitely not on the same scale as the App Store but they don't have to be because we charge more than what we would for an app and sales are good. We think we can find ways to make these iBooks even more efficiently and you can definitely expect more iBooks from us in the future." Kinkade prefers the App Store. "We've found that the iBookstore gets way less traffic than the traditional App Store. So we get the advantage by positioning our books with the apps. The only negative is that it's harder to get featured as a book in the App Store -- although we did. It was just hard as hell."
iBook Lessons: Publishing costs
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Andrew Hyde jumped into the ebook business with both feet. After fully funding a KickStarter project to raise start-up costs for his "This Book is about Travel," he published his manuscript to a variety of vendors. His outlets included Amazon's Kindle store, Apple's iBooks, and B&N's Nook, as well as Gumroad, a DRM-free PDF seller. What he found is that a ten-dollar ebook with lots of pictures brings home quite different earnings, depending on the vendor. In particular, he got hit -- and hit hard -- by Amazon's delivery fees. His 18 MB ebook costs him US$2.58 per Amazon download, which is a substantial overhead. Amazon details its delivery charges on this KDP help page. As an author, you pay $0.15 per megabyte in delivery charges, in addition to the 30% off-the-top costs Amazon charges. An image-heavy book will hit you hard in the pocketbook. That's quite different from Apple, which is happy to host resource-packed ebooks for a straight 30%. Hyde points out that delivering the same content using Amazon Web Services S3 would cost about a penny for each five downloads, bringing the Amazon mark up to about 129,000% in his calculation. So why sell Amazon? It's the demand. 51% of his Kickstarter supporters requested Kindle format, and 73% of his first 300 digital orders were Kindle. For all that Amazon charges, you don't make money on the books you don't sell. Hopefully, if enough authors speak up, Amazon will adjust its fee structure -- especially since many deliveries now happen over WiFi, not just Whispernet. Apple is providing an ever improving alternative for many readers, as I can personally see over time in the shift in sales of my ebooks. With its iBooks Author tool, allowance of books of up to 2GB in size, and strict 30% cut, Apple makes resource-rich books a more attractive prospect, assuming authors can find their customer base. Amazon remains the 800-pound gorilla in the ebook room. That may not always be so. Thanks, John Fricker
Cleaning Mona Lisa: Bringing iBooks to a new standard
TUAW was treated to an advanced look at a new iBook from Tapity. "Cleaning Mona Lisa" offers all of thirty-odd pages of content. Of those, perhaps half are a gallery of pictures. Those numbers are deceiving however, as the application's video content, gorgeous imagery, and interactive widgets -- not its page count or its text -- drives the book's narrative. Launching at US$2.99, Cleaning Mona Lisa is hosted by Lee Sandstead, "the worlds most fired up art historian," according to Tapity's press briefing. I found his video snippets thoroughly engaging as he introduces readers to the technical story behind art masterpieces. The book explains how painting technique, from egg-based tempuras to glossy oils, evolved to try to define the "HDTV" of the 1500's. You see how careful restoration removes the haziness of years to bring back the colors, textures, and details originally created by each artist. The book is a perfect introduction for young readers as well as adults. Its mix of videos, custom interactive widgets, and light reading cover the topic in a way that's sure to create a new audience of art enthusiasts. Developer Jeremy Olson of Tapity was kind enough to sit down and talk with me about the genesis of the book. He explained how inspired he was at the Apple Design Awards he attended a few years ago. While picking up his own ADA for Grades 2, he discovered Push Pop Press's "Our Choice," an interactive book. When Apple released iBooks Author this year, Tapity decided to test the waters. Approached by numerous potential partners, they decided to embrace Lee Sandstead, to build a new kind of storytelling, "that engages and delights on every page." Olson found that content partnership leveraged with a lot of elbow grease could let them see if iBooks would provide an alternative development platform. "Developing iBooks," he explained, "involved little more than the cost of our time. We put in hundreds of hours on this project." Olson guesses that using iBooks Author offered them a factor of "5, 6, or even 7 times improvement" in man hours versus developing a traditional iOS application. This project represents a big experiment for Tapity. "If anyone likes this book, if it's successful, it could end up the iBooks poster child for success. If any independently published iBooks Author book is going to make business sense, it would probably be this one. So far we have made connections with Apple and have had a good response from the press." Olson hopes the book will find an audience and offsetting those hundreds of man hours with enough sales to allow them to move onto further iBooks projects. Tapity already has additional content providers waiting if Cleaning Mona Lisa sells well. "This is a partnership deal," he explained. "People are coming to us with content, looking for a way to publish it. We'd like to do more of these ibooks and become more of a product company." As for the future of iBooks, Olson added, "We feel that traditional publishers are missing a big opportunity for playing with this platform." Would Tapity consider moving to other platforms like Android? "Honestly? We're really not that interested," Olson said. "We're focused on Apple. That's where we know people and where we know the culture." As for those people who buy Cleaning Mona Lisa, Olson hopes they walk away from the book having been inspired by its lessons. "Our technology is engaging," he said. "It should not distract because in the end, the book should be the content. Our readers should be impressed by what they've learned, not just by how we presented it. "The most challenging part is putting all of that together in a purposeful way to make every page engaging and fun. A lot of iBooks we saw used the technology just for the sake of technology. Widgets seemed arbitrary. We wanted everything to add to the narrative and I think we accomplished that." Cleaning Mona Lisa is now available for sale in iBooks (US$2.99). It can be read on iPads only.
Apple says Department of Justice "sides with monopoly"
In Apple's eye, the U.S. government has cast its lot with monopolies. Apple's legal response to the Department of Justice lawsuit, which the company filed May 22, claims that the case against Apple and other publishers over ebook pricing is "is fundamentally flawed as a matter of fact and law." As Ars Technica points out, Apple paints itself as a savior of ebook pricing, and that its entry into the ebook market allowed growth in the industry. Furthermore, Apple says that the request for relief, as filed by the Department of Justice, is not in the best interests of the public. This relief would be doing away with the agency model pricing of ebooks and reworking Apple's deals with the publishers involved. The 31-page response can be found here. It echos earlier statements Apple made after the lawsuit was filed in April.
