Apple Announces New Education and Publishing Apps for iPad

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Evan O'Connor

Apple held an educational publishing event at the Guggenheim in New York City yesterday, outlining three new apps for students, teachers, and publishers. The first announcement was for iBooks 2, Apple’s reinvention of textbooks. The free app is available today and features color-coded highlighting and note-taking, with a click-for-definition glossary; the notes and highlights transfer automatically to study/flash cards, and each chapter features interactive quizzes. The second announcement was for iBook Author, the anticipated “Garage Band for ebooks.” The new app (also free) brings the ease of use for interactive ebook creation on Mac OSX to an entirely new level—click and drag pictures, videos, Word documents, Keynote (PowerPoint) presentations, HTML and Java widgets directly into your ebook, and the text will reflow dynamically as you add and reposition elements. The app includes templates for making everything from cookbooks, children’s books, to math and science texts. iBook Author can publish directly to the iBookStore; the created iBooks have many of the same functionalities as iBooks 2, such as highlighting and note-taking, and a user-created glossary. The last announcement Apple made this morning was for an all new iTunes U dedicated app, which allows full online courses to be offered on the iPad—outlining everything from syllabus and office hours to notes from class, assignments, materials, or streaming lectures—and allows courses to be taken and followed for free from anywhere.

All of the apps are available for free today while high school textbooks sell at $14.99 or less, with Pearson, McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin, and DK Publishers all having books available for purchase immediately.

(We watched the event unfold live 10-11am EST January 19, 2012 with the Endgaget live event blog.)

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Celebrate 1st National Download Day With Your E-Reader or Tablet

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Evan O'Connor

Lulu.com has announced that the first annual National Download Day will be December 26, 2011—a day that Lulu predicts will be the highest traffic shopping day for e-reader and tablet content. With Amazon selling over a million Kindles a week and Apple and Barnes & Noble selling tablets at alarming speed this holiday season, it’s hard not to believe that traditional Boxing Day may turn into Download Day. Lulu believes that the day after Christmas, when millions of people unwrap their new e-reader or tablet (over 24.5 million sold this holiday season, according to IMS Research), they will immediately want to start to download content. With over a million talented and established authors selling e-content this season—such as Rockport’s own Ingeborg Lauterstein—on sites such as Lulu, we are about to see a new trend in virtual holiday giving. According to the Association of American Publishers, e-book sales are expected to double year after year. As an indicator of this trend, Lulu’s total e-book volume has increased 22% in 2011. We wish all of our readers a successful and rewarding National Download Day!

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Nazi-Occupied Childhood Inspires Tales of Humor and Mysticism—Now Available as E-Books!

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Evan O'Connor

Ingeborg Lauterstein survived a tumultuous childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna, Austria during World War II. She watched the world around her crumble, and lived to tell the tale: some 40 years later, her life and her volatile homeland formed the basis for two novels full of wonder and intrigue: The Water Castle (Houghton Mifflin, 1981) and Vienna Girl (W. W. Norton, 1986). Despite having been published to wide acclaim (Kirkus Reviews, the New York Times), both titles faded out of print until 2006 when Ingeborg republished under her own independent imprint, now called Star Island. Now, together with services provided by OBS, Ingeborg is following the growing number of established authors with books published by traditional publishers—such as John Edgar Wideman, James C. Moore, David Raterman, and Alisa Valdez—who are self-publishing in digital format. Ingeborg’s The Water Castle and Vienna Girl are now accessible for the first time on e-reader devices and apps through premier self-publishing site Lulu.com and the Amazon Kindle Store–making her previously hard-to-find books available worldwide, with the click of a button.

Links:
The Water Castle on Lulu.com
Vienna Girl on Lulu.com
The Water Castle on Amazon Kindle Store
Vienna Girl on Amazon Kindle Store

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Lending Library or Intellectual Property Heist?

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Evan O'Connor

With the first shipments of its e-reader tablet, the Kindle Fire, Amazon announced its new “Lending Library”—a free service available to “Prime” subscribers that allows them free access to more the 5,000 e-books. This $79.99/year membership also offers free 2-day shipping on all orders and free streaming video and music on the Kindle Fire. Sounds good for the Prime members, and even better for Amazon, the online retailer. But is this really a “lending library,” or an intellectual property heist, as some authors and publishers say, claiming that they never agreed to forgo their royalties nor gave permission for their works to be made available for free by the online retailing giant.

While the “big six” —- Random House, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan -— negotiated the lending library option out of their e-book contracts with Amazon, many smaller publishers were less fortunate, although apparently even outright refusals of permission didn’t stop Amazon from including some titles “as a no-risk trial to demonstrate to publishers the incremental growth and revenue opportunity that this new service presents.”*

Groups of writers and representatives have been sounding off: the Author’s Guild accused Amazon of taking advantage of others’ creative works in order to sell more of their tech devices and further their competitive advantage against their tablet-making foes Apple and Barnes & Noble; the Association of Author’s Representatives (AAR) states they are still unsure how or if the companies or creative parties will be compensated for their works.

The move further weakens the publishing industry because it plants seeds of doubt in the author/publisher relationship — how can authors trust publishers with protecting and leveraging their intellectual property if the publishers cannot control what their licensees like Amazon do with it? Furthermore, it’s objectionable that the retailer labelled their marketing gambit as a “lending library” — with the connotation of public good those words imply — rather the self-serving, competitive move it is.

Links:
*http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/16/amazon-kindle-lending-library-contract-authors – The Guardian
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/14/142315023/kindle-offers-lending-library-to-customers – NPR
http://aardvarknow.us/2011/11/04/author-contracts-and-subscription-models/ – Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR) blog, featuring AAR statement re: Kindle Lending Library

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