A Closer Look at iBooks Author, Textbooks and Exclusivity

[wonderspark]

I wonder about things like theft and replacements. If it were to really take off, and it becomes common knowledge that any kid walking home from school has a $600 iPad on him/her, that's a huge attraction for easy theft.

Then there's the standard big kid vs. little kid schoolyard fights, and the easy way to screw with an enemy by smashing his/her iPad. "I don't have my assignment because my iPad was crushed before I could write it."

In either case, that kid's education goes on hold until a new iPad is received? That's scary.

Maybe it'll all be gumdrop paths through licorice valleys beneath delicious chocolate waterfalls, though. Certainly interesting.

 

[smoledman]

Bottom line is nobody is forced to use iBooks authoring tool. You want the tool - pay the price. Nothing is truly free in this world.

 

[wonderspark]

Bottom line is nobody is forced to use iBooks authoring tool. You want the tool - pay the price. Nothing is truly free in this world.

But, it's a free download.

 

[Ausn]

Anyone figured out how to put an *.ibooks File on an iPhone? Drag and Drop iTunes tells me that the new Format is not supported.. I updated everything ofc.

Cheers

 

[swingerofbirch]

If you don't mind me asking, what disability entitles you to these digital copies?

I do have a documented disability, and I do know that I have an easier time focusing on the computer because I tend to write a lot of notes as I read and I can copy segments and write notes about them, annotate, easily etc. It's easier for me to focus.

However, the way it came about that I get books is not in a clear-cut way related to the disability. I was having extreme anxiety for a while and had trouble focusing on reading. So, I decided to buy an e-book version of the book for my class (I had already purchased the print version) assuming I could use text-to-speech to have it read out loud to be by the Mac. When I got the e-book version, every system service was disabled, and I couldn't even copy and paste the text to have it read out loud from a different application. So, I wrote the textbook company and told them I had a disability for which I needed an e-text which didn't have these restrictions. They told me that my school's disability office should have the PDF version of the book available and so I contacted them and they did! Since then, I just always request my books on PDF from the office. They don't ask any questions and seem to have every book I've ever needed available in PDF. Part of me has wondered whether the school is paying the textbook companies or whether the person who gets the books for me is using a file sharing service. Either way, I get the books in PDF and I don't have to pay for them. I don't know how to describe it exactly, but even when I don't use the text-to-speech feature, reading on the computer somehow feels more manageable. I feel more in control and I actually can focus better. But I don't know how that officially correlates with my disability (anxiety and Tourette's).

 

[Swift]

amazing hypocrisy by the critics

Is Amazon giving a free authoring program for a very advanced kind of eBook which expands on ePub? Why, no, I don't believe they do. Does Amazon (the ebook competition) offer their books in a public and free format? Why, no. It has DRM and a proprietary format. Does Amazon not take a cut of the books they sell? Why no, they do not. Wait a minute. Do the publishers take a cut of their authors' sales? Why yes, they do. And then they assume the production costs for a small printing run (if you're new). They may send you on a tour, but more likely you'll have to put a little campaign together yourself.

Authoring an eBook puts you in iTunes, one of the most valuable pieces of real estate for third parties making a profit in the world. Writing for Amazon gives you the Amazon store.

I'm all for what Apple has done, though I think they should publish their extensions to ePub 3. Make it an open standard, so other sellers could copy it. Write their own authoring software. Write their contracts, with different tools, different conditions. Choose to sell their hardware.

The ePub standard is workable, but not rich.

How do people suppose that businesses stay in business? How authors will be able to make a living? Free as in beer is fine at times. As a company's bread and butter, it won't work. If you want to do differently, make a non-profit foundation that chooses, publicizes and sells e-books. Put it in an open format. It would do the country a lot of good. But until then, this is a good thing for authors. The criticism will likely die down as authors start making money.

It would be nice, in a la-la land sort of way, if corporations cooperated with their rivals. But by their legal nature, they can't do that.

So make a non-profit cooperative that distributes books. Raise money from literacy foundations, etc. Use the ePub format. Make public and free extensions to the format. And get Congress to pass a law requiring all eBooks to have a free ePub format available of all their works, to be released after a year or two. All but the newest books would have a plain version available at the e-reader in your library, or on your device. Like closed captioning. Like public libraries. They're free, too.

Ultimately, Apple's announcement is only bad news for paper workers.

Original, proprietary releases could be fancy, gussied-up, and so on. Then the ePub, plainer but free, comes along.

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Bottom line is nobody is forced to use iBooks authoring tool. You want the tool - pay the price. Nothing is truly free in this world.

If Google had written it, it would be free -- but they'd show everyone your Google+ page. (Bye-bye, J.D. Salinger.) And they'd have much more data to share with advertisers.

There's a price for everything.

 

[MattInOz]

(ditto)
Absolutely. And if the US would just like to drop the UK a cheque for the €834bn it owes us, we'll get right on it

Steve.

(And yes, I know the US likewise holds around €500bn of UK debt - although why we don't just all cancel out these debt payments back and forth between countries and simplify things is another matter... Still, got to keep the bankers employed I guess!)

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Sadly, what I can imagine happening is that rather than someone write one textbook covering an entire year's worth of the subject, it'll get broken down into several volumes, each selling for the $15 mark and covering one term or one module of the course. The author still gets much the same as they would have and the student ends up paying much the same.

Steve.

It's the same situation as music albums some are made as complete works some are just a bunch of songs. Some textbooks will still need to be complete books others are just collected together to make them easier to distribute.

The publishers can pick from any number of strategies to get the revenue they want from the work. Having smaller more focused texts might give them a boarder market. They could slim the text down to a core that covers a long period of study but have small cheap supplementary texts that allow teachers to tailor the study to each student.

The publisher might get other benefits out of this. Instead of one big pay cheque a year (or twice a year) they'll have a continuous revenue stream, plus can plan updates and content releases spread across the year.

 

[linuxcooldude]

Anyone figured out how to put an *.ibooks File on an iPhone? Drag and Drop iTunes tells me that the new Format is not supported.. I updated everything ofc.

Cheers

No, its not supported on the iPhone. My guess is the small screen size would make it very hard to use an interactive book like an iPad would.

 

[gnasher729]

How about this:

Songs created w/ Garageband or Logic have to be given away free of charge or sold exclusively through iTunes Store
Movies created w/ iMovie or Final Cut have to be given away free of charge or sold exclusively through iTunes Store
Documents created w/ Pages or Textedit or iBook Author have to be given away free of charge or sold exclusively through iTunes Store

Bugatti charges people over a million pound for a Bugatti Veyron. Clearly that must be wrong. What if Ford charged a million pound for a car? Most Ford car owners would never be able to pay for their car in a lifetime.

Does that make the fault in your logic clear? The reason why Ford doesn't charge a million is not because there is something morally or legally wrong with it, but because their cars are not worth that much. The reason why Garageband or Logic don't have these restrictions is not that there is something legally or morally wrong with it, but that people would use different software.

Apple gives you a tool for free that you can use to distribute knowledge for free, or that you can use to distribute knowledge and make money. If you use Apple's free tool to distribute knowledge for free, that's really nice of you and much appreciated, and Apple helps you by giving you a free tool and not restricting what you do in any way. If you use Apple's free tool to distribute knowledge for money, Apple wants a cut. If you don't like it, find some other tool.

I also have been told that Microsoft has been selling for many years Microsoft Office for home users with a license that disallows any commercial use. Anyone who has that software with a home user license might want to post what the exact terms are.

 

[kdarling]

How do people suppose that businesses stay in business? How authors will be able to make a living? Free as in beer is fine at times. As a company's bread and butter, it won't work. If you want to do differently, make a non-profit foundation that chooses, publicizes and sells e-books. Put it in an open format. It would do the country a lot of good. But until then, this is a good thing for authors. The criticism will likely die down as authors start making money.

It'll be interesting to see if major companies produce really decent and lengthy interactive textbooks for the price limit Apple set. It takes a lot of work (read: cost) to make a good one and a profit of $10 each isn't much of a payback, even if they sold a million.

It would be nice, in a la-la land sort of way, if corporations cooperated with their rivals. But by their legal nature, they can't do that.

On the contrary, companies do cooperate, especially when it cuts their costs. That's why we have standards for USB, hard drives, video cables and so forth.

Apple, like other companies, picks and chooses what standards they'll support, depending on what it costs or profits them.

That's why they made such a fuss about anyone using Flash for content (which has players available almost everywhere), but are okay with making their own single vendor textbook format and even legally locking their tool's output to their own store..

 

[linuxcooldude]

Apple gives you a tool for free that you can use to distribute knowledge for free, or that you can use to distribute knowledge and make money. If you use Apple's free tool to distribute knowledge for free, that's really nice of you and much appreciated, and Apple helps you by giving you a free tool and not restricting what you do in any way. If you use Apple's free tool to distribute knowledge for money, Apple wants a cut. If you don't like it, find some other tool.

Yeah, in some ways it does not make sense. People complain if they can't use the free tool to make money on another site. Why can't they give away their book for free? Kind of hypocritical in a way. They want to make money with it, but just not Apple.

It'll be interesting to see if major companies produce really decent and lengthy interactive textbooks for the price limit Apple set. It takes a lot of work (read: cost) to make a good one and a profit of $10 each isn't much of a payback, even if they sold a million.

CEO of Mcgraw-Hill said thats just how they will make their money, by selling at high volume.

 

[macsforme]

He can't think of anything "near as rewarding"? I would have thought it beyond English teachers to substitute a preposition for an adverb.

 

[Marcus2]

Lack of Quicktime VR on ibooks 2

I know Apple has not shown any interest in QTVR for some time but with the iPad and ibooks 2 it seems such a terrible shame not to be able to use it. The 3D model capability of ibooks 2 is ok but 3D images based on real photographs are both easier to make for most people (using QTVR) and are also of greater utility in my opinion. Am I alone with this opinion?

 

[radiogoober]

It'll be interesting to see if major companies produce really decent and lengthy interactive textbooks for the price limit Apple set. It takes a lot of work (read: cost) to make a good one and a profit of $10 each isn't much of a payback, even if they sold a million.

How are the current textbooks? I only downloaded the free one. I'm not paying $15 for a likely high school level textbook. I'm curious if the $15 are full length, multiple hundred page textbooks.

 

[Can't Stop]

Bottom line is nobody is forced to use iBooks authoring tool. You want the tool - pay the price. Nothing is truly free in this world.

Indeed. If Apple is so horrible and selfish this initiative will die down on it's own.

 

[cotak]

Give easily distracted kids books on an ipad where they can do more fun things than study. Smart. Now those kids who can't concentrate will do badly at school, grow up, work at some dead end job and use all their expendable income on apple product cause they grew up with it. Is that the plan?

500 to 600 dollar per device plus cost of books. Does that make much sense to anyone? Considering how hard kids are on their stuff. I remember I used to need a new backpack every year or so cause it would just get so worn out.

As for use in college. Again, people are bloody distracted already with bringing laptops to class. And you still can't take any good notes on laptops or tablets for science class, especially ones which are math heavy. The whole point of having classes is that you get "interactivity" with your teacher.

Overall it seems TO ME (you might feel different) apple is doing something because they can and not because they should with digital text books.

 

[Can't Stop]

Give easily distracted kids books on an ipad where they can do more fun things than study. Smart. Now those kids who can't concentrate will do badly at school, grow up, work at some dead end job and use all their expendable income on apple product cause they grew up with it. Is that the plan?

500 to 600 dollar per device plus cost of books. Does that make much sense to anyone? Considering how hard kids are on their stuff. I remember I used to need a new backpack every year or so cause it would just get so worn out.

As for use in college. Again, people are bloody distracted already with bringing laptops to class. And you still can't take any good notes on laptops or tablets for science class, especially ones which are math heavy. The whole point of having classes is that you get "interactivity" with your teacher.

Overall it seems TO ME (you might feel different) apple is doing something because they can and not because they should with digital text books.

Not that i disagree, but if i was able to have all my books on a single device like iPad when i was in school or in later years, it would have been great productivity boost.

There is a more serious learning that can be done here apart from kiddies and their stuff. Serious books for serious purposes and serious people.

It's a tool, a source of knowledge, how you use it and what you learn is up to you alone.

 

[-LikesMac-]

IMO, iPads should be given to only High School and College students first.

 

[aggri1]

Where I went to uni there was a thriving second-hand market for textbooks, and I'm sure that that is quite common. What are the chances that I can sell an iBook when I'm finished with it? Might be that this new system ends up costing students more than plain old books... I guess that might depend on how easily these things can be illegally copied.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

Where I went to uni there was a thriving second-hand market for textbooks, and I'm sure that that is quite common. What are the chances that I can sell an iBook when I'm finished with it? Might be that this new system ends up costing students more than plain old books... I guess that might depend on how easily these things can be illegally copied.

Right now that second hand market is doing ok but the publishers are trying to kill it with completely BS "new editions" and by new editions I mean the suggest problems at the end of each chapter are in a different order. They are not different problems but the exact same ones in a slightly different order. With this they kill off the old edition and force new ones to be purchased.

 

[mjtomlin]

I love the idea of reducing the cost of textbooks -- but shifting the cost from communities to public school students causes serious equity problems. The cost of paying for textbooks for a year might not seem significant to those of us who buy (and follow) Apple products -- but it's a hell of a cost to people living on the brink, and an impossible one for millions of poor, unemployed, underemployed, or merely underpaid people..

Schools can hand out redemption codes to students for any necessary books. Furthermore as an incentive, Apple may offer free textbooks with the purchase of iPads.

 

[mjtomlin]

That's why they made such a fuss about anyone using Flash for content (which has players available almost everywhere), but are okay with making their own single vendor textbook format and even legally locking their tool's output to their own store..

They made a fuss over a proprietary format being used on an open web. Not the same thing here. iBooks is a proprietary app with its own format.

The kindle format can only be played on A kindle device or software. So I'm not sure what your anti-apple argument is about?

They are not locking the tools output to their store. iBooks can be downloaded from a website and side loaded through iTunes. The only thing they are locking is where authors can sell their iBook formatted book... That does not apply to PDF or text output.

 

[Can't Stop]

That's why they made such a fuss about anyone using Flash for content (which has players available almost everywhere), but are okay with making their own single vendor textbook format and even legally locking their tool's output to their own store..

It is their tool which they give away for free and even then it allows you to save your work as text and pdf.

In what way it isn't fair? Do you imagine that any other company would be okay releasing a tool with such capabilities seeing how anyone can do anything they want including profiting by selling that interactive book they made somewhere else?

Does not compute, man.

 

[zzzzzzzzz]

Making it economical

One of the other bonuses of moving e/i-books is that it vastly simplifies distribution and totally removes the expensive printing process. This means state education boards can make in-house books instead of doing what has thus far been outsourced to the textbook publishers. So instead of buying texts for 100,000 students, the state boards can give 5-10 of their top teachers a sabbatical from teaching to write an iBook for each level of each of the subjects (maybe hire a graphic designer and HTML5 coder to help out), and then distribute the texts FREE to all the students in the state.

Now, pay the teachers another $5k a year (or whatever) to keep the books updated, and your content costs are done. Even if you pay these content creators quite a large sum for that one year, those costs are diluted among such a large number of students so as to become negligible.

The only major cost is then the iPads for the students. A number of you have made really valid points about the iPad being a non-educational distraction and total theft magnet, and these will need to be considered, but one way to at least reduce both problems is to make stripped down and locked down education-only varieties of the iPads. Fewer people will want to steal them (maybe make the backs schoolbus yellow so they're easily distinguished).

Lots of options here. Well before the iPad came out, I thought replacing textbooks was the most obvious justification for a tablet. And apple always seemed like the one to do it. I really do think it's just a matter of time.

 

[radiogoober]

One of the other bonuses of moving e/i-books is that it vastly simplifies distribution and totally removes the expensive printing process. This means state education boards can make in-house books instead of doing what has thus far been outsourced to the textbook publishers. So instead of buying texts for 100,000 students, the state boards can give 5-10 of their top teachers a sabbatical from teaching to write an iBook for each level of each of the subjects (maybe hire a graphic designer and HTML5 coder to help out), and then distribute the texts FREE to all the students in the state.

Now, pay the teachers another $5k a year (or whatever) to keep the books updated, and your content costs are done. Even if you pay these content creators quite a large sum for that one year, those costs are diluted among such a large number of students so as to become negligible.

The only major cost is then the iPads for the students. A number of you have made really valid points about the iPad being a non-educational distraction and total theft magnet, and these will need to be considered, but one way to at least reduce both problems is to make stripped down and locked down education-only varieties of the iPads. Fewer people will want to steal them (maybe make the backs schoolbus yellow so they're easily distinguished).

Lots of options here. Well before the iPad came out, I thought replacing textbooks was the most obvious justification for a tablet. And apple always seemed like the one to do it. I really do think it's just a matter of time.

Worst. Idea. Ever.

If my kid ever ended up at a high school where he was being taught with books that were written by people who:

1. barely graduated college in the easiest major possible,
2. barely understand high school level math and science,
3. and also books that weren't reviewed by numerous experts on the subject,

then I would hire a private teacher and have my kids home schooled. And let's not forget the backwards holy roller states where the science textbook would read "God did it! To synthesize proteins, you simply pray and god does the work for you! The earliest man was Adam and Eve 6,000 years ago and Jesus rode a dinosaur to work!"