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iBooks Author Challenge: Adding spelling quizzes to iBooks
Dave Caolo and I were chatting this morning about iBooks and spelling. "It's not my daughter's favorite subject," he said, "and I'm looking for a way to make it more appealing to her." He asked if there could there be any way to incorporate spelling quizzes into iBooks via Author. The answer is, unfortunately, not clearly yes. That's because iBooks Author assumes that all interaction will be by multiple choice. That means you can create interactions to choose from common misspellings and from homonyms, but can't solicit freeform text entry. That gives rise to the kind of interaction you see below. The shortcomings are apparent. For example, you cannot define any item that isn't tied to a specific location (so you can't create a pool of misspellings without destinations). If the reader switches the order of the two misspelled words (here Tale and Flour) those are marked wrong as well. So I hopped into Dashcode and built a widget that would solicit a correctly spelled word and embedded it into an Author project as follows. This turned out to be a failure. Although the embedded audio prompt worked fine (albeit in a separate interactive element), widgets do not run in-line and iBook's interpretation of the widget hid my embedded checker button. This might be due to my subpar Widget construction, or I may simply be running into iBooks 2 limitations. So how can you expand iBooks for spelling? This post tells you where I am to date. If you have a better solution, drop a note into the comments. And if you are an expert Dashboard widget engineer, please ping me offline. I'd really love to test out the possibilities and limitations of this tech.
Switched On: You tell me it's the institution
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Apple rose to dominate sales of digital music by more or less mirroring the way consumers acquired music in the physical world -- that is, purchasing songs, but providing a greater degree of granularity. This worked well for music and has also held true for apps and best-selling books, but hasn't been as in step with consumer media acquisition habits for other content.For example, before Apple brought sales of video material to iTunes, most consumers did not generally own TV shows except for perhaps a few cherished series on DVD. They either watched them as they aired as part of a cable-like subscription or paid a flat monthly fee for the privilege of recording them on a DVR to be viewed after they aired. Furthermore, both Blockbuster physical stores and later Netflix's DVD by mail feature relied on a system of one-time consumption via rental or subscription that eschewed ownership of movies. And today, Vevo.com offers free streaming of many music videos that Apple still seeks to sell.
Using iBooks Author to produce a comic
When iBooks Author was released last week, I saw the potential for using it to port the webcomic I co-create to the iPad to go along with our upcoming print edition. I'm not alone, as Richard Stevens of Diesel Sweeties immediately took the chance to test iBooks Author by creating an ebook with the most recent month's worth of comics. Stevens is offering the ebook through his website via Dropbox rather than through the main iBooks store, so those who want to test it out will need to manually sync it over, email it to themselves on the iPad or use an app such as Dropbox to add it on the iPad. Stevens said he would love to eventually get a collection to readers that's searchable, sortable by character and major storyline and more. For my own comic, I'd love to add in some of the historical information on the characters, the fairy tales used, etc. iBooks Author is a step toward making these sorts of interactive comics available, and it'll be create to see how other comics creators can bend iBooks Author to their will. [Via Macstories]
iBooks Author sees 600,000 initial downloads, 3 million for iTunes U app
Apple announced on its quarterly earnings call this afternoon that iBooks Author had seen 600,000 downloads since its unveiling last week. The folks in Cupertino also mentioned that iTunes U has seen 3 million app downloads, feeling a bump from the announcement a few days ago. One other interesting tidbit: currently, 1.5 million iPads have been deployed in schools. We'd surmise that those numbers will continue to increase as iBooks 2 and iBook Author start to pound the pavement in the months ahead.
iBooks Author owns your format, not your content
There's been a lot of heat and fury surrounding the iBooks Author terms and conditions ever since the service was introduced last week. To boil the controversy down to basics, Apple has introduced a private protocol extension that takes EPUB to the next generation. And then they created a business model that uses this proprietary technology to monetize commercial transactions. This runs right in line with my predictions from earlier this month. This decision, to build a proprietary format on an open standard, has led to a lively debate about whether a member of an open standards organization should be creating private standards like the .ibooks format or AirPlay. And, to be fair to Apple, to even realize that this proprietary format is based on an open standard, you actually have to crack open the files and expose the EPUB underpinnings. Apple wasn't exactly announcing how they did things last week at the educational media event. From a tech point of view, the .ibooks format itself is exciting stuff. It takes a major step forward, blending HTML 5 tech directly into ebooks and unifying books with the complete iWorks suite. A few weeks ago, I wrote that "I believe that Apple should be leading a revolution in embedded live book elements with video, programmable app and web integration, and more (Think "Khan Academy" as books, for example). Why aren't we seeing both the specs and the tools with Apple trailblazing forward?" Today, that reality is here, with iBooks Author. I know several people who are already using the Khan Academy material. And because Apple moves the format forward so much from the open standard it was based upon, developers should have no issues with Apple making the updated version private. If you thought Dashcode was an optional Xcode extra not worthy of notice, now's a great time to reassess. At the risk of being hit with rotten vegetables, the "sweet solution" of 2007 has now come into its own: 1960's? Plastic. 2010's? HTML 5. With smart coding, you can embed entire applications into iBooks. Scarily accomplished developer Steven Troughton-Smith recently managed to embed a playable version of his classic iOS app Lights Off inside an iBooks book using a Dashcode widget written with HTML 5. "This is the first time Dashboard widgets have worked on iOS," he points out. What's more, he tells me that some developers have gotten the WebOS app framework (Enyo) and Cappucino to run inside their books. In terms of creative expression, this is a huge development with nearly limitless possibilities. Troughton-Smith said, "It will be absolutely epic for designers and developers making portfolios, or perhaps a book that reviews apps and contains mini versions, or whatever." So yes, Apple intends to control the sole paid delivery portal for this technology, freely offering the tool to create new .ibooks files, taking a 30% cut of all commercial material developed using this specification. At the same time, they're the ones who are developing both the authoring tools and the distribution apps on their own nickel. I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that I believe that Apple is moving forward in a smart and well-calculated fashion. While Amazon's KDP Select program created exclusivity due to legal agreements and shared profits, Apple is building its own kind of proprietary author cadre based on new and forward-looking technology. Absolutely no one will be forced to use the new .ibooks format or the tools that create those files. If you wish to publish a non-exclusive EPUB on the iBooks store as well as on Amazon, Nook, etc, you are welcome to do so. Nor do I personally think that Apple will come after anyone who shares material between .ibooks editions and EPUB ones. I am, obviously not a lawyer, but I believe Apple is protecting and charging for use of its format, not aggressively seizing content. On the whole, I have been deeply pleased with nearly everything I have discovered in iBooks -- from its media support to its strong accessibility extensions. I don't know about you, but I'm getting ready to brush up on my Javascript skills. If you're an app dev, you probably will want to as well. [Update February 3rd 2012: Apple's terms and conditions now clarify "If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple. This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format."]
Students demonstrate innovative iPad book page flip
One major complaint about reading an eBook is the experience; holding an iPad is just not the same as holding a book and thumbing through the pages. This complaint may lose some of its weight if the folks at the KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence can get their patented Smart E-Book Interface Prototype out of the lab and into the wild. The interface uses the private Apple API for the page flip and turns it upside down and inside out. Not only do you get a beautiful page flip like the one in iBooks, you also get page flipping that lets you scan 20 or 30 pages at a time, multiple page flips that are controlled by the speed of your finger swipe, and a way to hold your thumb on one page and flip through the book with your fingers. You can see it in action in the video below to marvel at how the interface mimics the way most people flip the pages of a softcover book. [Via Macgasm]
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.
Report: Apple sees 350,000 textbook downloads within three days after iBooks 2 debut
Apple has yet to release any official numbers, but early returns on its new iBooks textbook store are looking pretty promising. According to Global Equities Research, more than 350,000 textbooks were downloaded within three days of the store's debut, along with some 90,000 downloads of the iBooks Author platform. As All Things D explains, Global Equities Research used a proprietary system to compile these numbers and hasn't revealed much about its methodology, but its figures, if accurate, would certainly mark an auspicious beginning to Cupertino's latest "reinvention."
Official Mario and Zelda songbooks now available in English
The musician/gamer hybrid isn't as rare as one might think; spending five minutes on YouTube searching for "piano covers" is proof enough that the musically inclined among us are continuing to explore their passion for video games in creative and expressive ways. One of the major hurdles facing musical gamers (or gamicians, if you will) is the difficulty inherent in finding official sheet music or tabulature for video-game soundtracks. Songbooks are often expensive and in Japanese -- if they even exist in the first place. Now though, the hunt for gaming sheet music has just gotten a little easier.Four officially licensed Nintendo-oriented songbooks are now available in The Queen's English from Alfred Music Publishing. The books, Super Mario for Guitar, Super Mario for Piano, Super Mario for Easy Piano and The Legend of Zelda for Piano each contain more than 30 songs from various games in their respective series. What's more, Super Mario for Piano and The Legend of Zelda for Piano are also available in ebook format on Apple's iBookstore.Each book retails for between $16.99 and $19.99, and while Mario and Zelda aren't exactly obscure, there's something to be said for learning the classics. Let's hope this is the beginning of a new trend in localizing gaming sheet music; we'd give up an arm for a Mega Man 3 songbook. No, wait, we'd give up a leg. We need that arm to play music.
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.
iBooks Author accounts are free, existing developers need a new account
Setting up an account to publish books to the iBookstore has always been free, and the new iBooks Author tool has brought that fact into the spotlight. Self-publishing books to the iBookstore does still have a few hurdles you have to leap through, however. As AppleInsider points out, for iOS and Mac developers in particular, one hurdle is that existing iTunes Connect App Store accounts won't allow you to upload books to the iBookstore; instead, you'll need to set up a separate Apple ID associated with iBooks Author. Account setup also requires you to input credit card information and have a US-based tax ID -- for individuals self-publishing content, a Social Security number will suffice. For some odd reason, iBooks also require an ISBN (a requirement the Kindle Store doesn't have), and those aren't cheap. In the US, purchasing a single ISBN from Bowker costs $125, or you can buy them in discounted packs. Personally, I have no idea why they're allowed to get away with those prices; ISBNs in my country are available for free. Speaking from personal experience, setting up a publisher account on the iBookstore is a lengthy and somewhat unintuitive process -- but nowhere near as slow and frustrating as dealing with traditional publishers. Developers not being able to use an existing iTunes Connect account to publish iBookstore content is a bit baffling, however, and hopefully it's something Apple will address.
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 Author hands-on (update: video!)
Inside every frustrated journalist is an even more frustrated author, and self-publishing is an evil that many of us have succumbed to over the years. Still, much as we may want to resist it, we couldn't help ourselves when it came time to test Apple's iBooks Author app, designed for educators to push out textbooks to students for a fraction of the cost, time and energy it would traditionally take.So, how does it feel when you're working inside the software? Could you use it to prepare seminar materials for the class of 2015 or, more importantly, launch your own career as Stephanie Meyer's successor? Head past the break to find out!
iBooks 2 lets authors set textbook prices in exchange for Apple exclusivity
Were you wondering about the economics behind Apple's new e-textbooks? Well, it turns out that Cupertino is giving authors the ability to set their own prices as long as they remain $14.99 or under. In exchange, Apple takes a 30 percent cut, and requires authors take an oath of fealty to Tim Cook -- ok, not really, but any e-textbook author that wants access to the iPad-toting masses must make his or her work an exclusive to iBooks 2. So there you have it folks, if you want to take a gander at these awesome new e-textbooks, you'll have to jump on the iOS bandwagon.
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.
