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It's unbelievable how many different projects and paradigms SJ was intimately involved in, on every level.
 
"Apple's education-focused media event scheduled is scheduled for this Thursday"

Sheesh sort it out macrumours.
 
If this is the dawn of self-publishing on Apple gadgets it's most likely a shot at amazon, who have been doing this on Kindle for a while now, and even had their first million selling self-published book a while ago. Those kinds of figures make even Apple sniff the potential profit.
 
Lack of sleep, macrumors? :)

Check spelling and grammar in this article, please.
 
Lets hope they at least show us an major update of iWork for iPad or some new apple app, if theres not gonna be any new hardware (ipad3)...
 
It's unbelievable how many different projects and paradigms SJ was intimately involved in, on every level.

"Intimately involved" probably means that Steve stepped in the room, looked at what the developers had on their screens and said "this sucks", "it's not fancy enough" (okay, that one was a famous Bill Gates phrase) or he gave them some more specific instructions. Jobs' involvement happened on a managerial level, and I think everybody who has ever worked in a company knows first hand what the "intimate" involvement of a manager actually (only) means.

What made Jobs different than the average manager were his sophisticated taste and sense for beauty which helped him filter out mediocrity.

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That metaphor makes sense... doesn't it?

It's supposed to be something that for people who want to create content to be able to create it in the easiest way Apple thinks is possible.

If this does happen, then everyone in education would be able to release materials that are immersive, interactive and way more helpful than it was before.

Hope this works out well.

I'd love to have a spin with it.


So this thing has to be an easy to use mix of Scrivener, Acrobat and... Flash. If they can pull this off, I'll buy it in a heartbeat - provided that it can create content for multiple platforms. But knowing that this is Apple, it will probably only create stuff for their iOS-based products, and then I'm already no longer interested.
 
Full support for ePub 3.0 is a huge milestone in eBook publishing. Glad to hear this is happening.
 
That is cool does that mean like anyone can publish a book as loog as its approved by apple? pshhh i could be a millionaire in hours lmao

Jesus, have you been living under a rock? You could publish books on Amazon's Kindle Store and Apple's iBooks Store from day one. It has never been easier to get your work published and the necessary tools for that have also been available for a long time now, and some of them are even free. But getting your stuff SOLD still is the difficult part, and no magic "Garageband for eBooks" will make that easier.
 
That is cool does that mean like anyone can publish a book as loog as its approved by apple? pshhh i could be a millionaire in hours lmao

What makes you think everyone would purchase your book?

Because he thinks he's the first one to ever think of self-publishing? ;)

People have been self-publishing via Amazon for a while now.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-summary-page.html?topic=200260520

Edit:
Jesus, have you been living under a rock? You could publish books on Amazon's Kindle Store and Apple's iBooks Store from day one. It has never been easier to get your work published and the necessary tools for that have also been available for a long time now, and some of them are even free. But getting your stuff SOLD still is the difficult part, and no magic "Garageband for eBooks" will make that easier.
Ah I see you beat me to it.
 
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I think we might see the long awaited update to iWork for OS X. Also an updated iBooks with support for annotating and highlighting in PDF's. Possibly an OS X client for iBooks also.

Then again. Maybe not.
 
* Waiting to see how the trolls spin this in a negative light. *

Apple's going to open a store and only Apple approved books will get published, proving that 1984 was like 1984 after all.

Seriously, this would be great, especially if interactive features and content could be created, similar to say captivate. Combine that with Apple's way to make things intuitive, simple, with a good distribution model and they will have a real winner.
 
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I hope this is true. I've been trying to learn how to author an ebook that is heavy on pictures and organization and the options are confusing and limited. Pages does export, but it's very far from the solution I want.
 
So this thing has to be an easy to use mix of Scrivener, Acrobat and... Flash. If they can pull this off, I'll buy it in a heartbeat - provided that it can create content for multiple platforms. But knowing that this is Apple, it will probably only create stuff for their iOS-based products, and then I'm already no longer interested.

Yeah, that iOS wall can be a turn off, but if they really would like to help education with some seriously helpful apps, wouldn't there be an export feature that can run on other platforms?

It does seem like a problem though...

epub is only for iPads and iPhones...
pdfs are not Apple

so the only way this will work is if there's a Windows program that will run the end product of the newly planned textbooks.. THAT will not likely happen...

I don't know what will be announced, but if it IS something awesome, then great! If not.. well, I'll have fun with it on my macs and iPads. .. I guess..
 

I see your pleasantly-worded post has disappeared, but to answer your (now deleted) questions, via MathType it's been possible to enter complex mathematical equations in Pages documents for some time. Also, you can, for example, embed video in a Pages document. Both equations and video carry over to the Pages-generated ePub output, and, of course, can be viewed on an iPad or iPhone.

It doesn't take much to imagine that a new version of Pages might allow for a greater degree of interactivity and flexibility.
 
I would love to see this! If they make publishing to the iBook store easy, and offer a 70/30 revenue split, Apple is going to make a ton of money and so are independent authors.

Heck, this might inspire me to start jotting down some of my business expertise and getting published too!
 
I think this has the potential of being huge for Apple. Only time will tell.

Agreed, App Store brought an easy way to make money as an amateur developer, maybe this will do the same in the book business? What I look forward to the most though, is Apple kicking the education industry's ass and makes them evolve into the digital life!
 
Pages already exports to ePub, why would another product be needed?

Edit: As charlituna noted, maybe it's simply going to involve a new version of Pages (something with better iCloud integration is needed anyway).

It would be nice if it competed somewhat with Adobe's digital publishing suite in CS 5.5. Not necessarily that professional, but it's fairly complicated to create an interactive publication (with video, slideshows, links, etc). You start with InDesign, then use their Folio Builder, then sign-up for an Acrobat.com account, then hope someone downloads the Adobe folio reader for an iPad.

Would love to just easily create a publication that I could submit to the iOS 5 Newsstand easier.
 
Partner with Wolfram?

Since Apple has a relationship with Wolfram-Alpha (for Siri), I wonder if they're going to include support for Wolfram's new Computable Document Format (CDF) on Thursday.

If they're talking about creating interactive documents, this is one way to do it.

http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/

If Apple can find a way to make it super easy to create a document with this level of interactivity, then it may be game-changing.
 
If this is the dawn of self-publishing on Apple gadgets it's most likely a shot at amazon, who have been doing this on Kindle for a while now, and even had their first million selling self-published book a while ago. Those kinds of figures make even Apple sniff the potential profit.

Except that Amazon's version of self-publishing is entirely one dimensional, i.e., just text on a screen. It sounds like the tool Apple will announce is going to allow a layman to create an interactive publication without typing a single line of code, just drag and drop. If that turns out to be the case big difference I'd say.
 
Books are Amazon's profit center. The rest has really low markup. This cuts into Amazon where it hurts. Play with fire and you are bound to get burnt!!!

Not sure how this would hurt Amazon - if we assume full ePub3 standard support and not some odd Apple standard; all Amazon needs to do is provide a way to migrate the books to their Kindle platform. Publishers can then sell on a multitude of sites. Now, if Apple started to add Kindle versions, then...
 
Except that Amazon's version of self-publishing is entirely one dimensional, i.e., just text on a screen. It sounds like the tool Apple will announce is going to allow a layman to create an interactive publication without typing a single line of code, just drag and drop. If that turns out to be the case big difference I'd say.

No, Amazon's KF8 (announced last year; the SDK was recently released) allows interactive formats. As does epub3, although I don't think any readers actually support this.

If Apple gets publishers on board, this will be a big deal. Just another interactive format is much less of a big deal...although there is always room for improvement.
 
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