"iBooks" entries
The give and take between e-publishing standards and innovation
Bill McCoy on EPUB 3 and keeping pace with innovation.
In this video interview, Bill McCoy, executive director of the IDPF, says it's important to emphasize and encourage the innovative aspects of building upon EPUB 3, as long as that innovation doesn't lock consumers in to one closed silo.
About the Emerging Battles Over Textbooks: Options from Apple to Open Initiatives
Two dramatically opposed announcements from Apple and the state of California put the textbook publishing industry on notice recently that it could be facing rapid disruption. But open textbooks can't be created and altered as easily as open source software.
Developer Week in Review: Early thoughts on iBooks Author
The impact of iBooks Author, free vs usability, and Microsoft wants developers to level up.
It looks like Apple plans to totally disrupt yet another industry, but is that a good thing? Richard Stallman puts free above usability, and Microsoft adds incentives to Visual Studio — but some of them encourage the wrong behaviors.
Publishing News: Can the Nook be a viable business by itself?
B&N considers a spin-off, news organizations launch NewsRight, and the Apple rumor mill is churning again.
B&N mulled a Nook spin-off, news organizations decided it’s time to capitalize on aggregators, and the 2012 Apple guessing revs up with rumors on iBooks and publishing.
Actually, half of all iPad Books are Fiction
Suggestions to my previous post inspired me to normalize our metadata1 for titles available through the U.S. iBooks app. A comment prompted me to rollup iBooks publishers into publishing conglomerates2: Comments from other readers gave me the idea to map the 100+ iBooks categories to the more familiar BISAC categories. Doing so means over half of all iBooks titles are…
The iPad in Europe (the English speaking part at least)
Editor's note: This is the first in a series of posts exploring the reception–and potential impact, of the iPad in locations other than the good ole USA. In today's entry, Eoin Purcell chimes in from Ireland. ~ Kat MeyerIt can be hard to envision the impact a device will have when you have only demo videos and second hand reports…
A few weeks in, a third of iPad Books are Fiction
Measured in terms of number of titles, half of the over 46,000 (paid and free) books available that we detected as being offered through the iBooks app are from 6 categories1. Fiction & Literature alone account for close to a third of all available iBooks titles: The current set of titles is indicative of the publishers (and/or imprints) that Apple…
Cookbooks: The highest priced iPad book category
Just like the iTunes app store, the iBooks app on the iPad spotlights the Top Paid (and Top Free) books within each category. Here are some charts that compare the average price (by rank)1 across the major categories. The average price of the Top 50 titles across the major categories range from $7-$15. Cookbooks, History, Biographies are slightly higher priced,…