Yesterday, Apple made one of its trademark ‘big announcements’ – and this time it was taking on a new industry: education and educational publishing. There were three new products announced: iBooks 2, a bookstore for digital textbooks; iTunes U, an app of free courses from several educational institutions that you can access on your phone; and – of most interest to us here at the round – an ebook authoring and creation software called iBooks Author.We have yet to actually download and play with iBooks Author (which is free as long as you have a Mac computer and are running Mac OS X Lion), but judging by what we hear from our colleagues it’s very easy and intuitive to use and can make great enhanced ebooks. Here is what Apple says about it:
Available free on the Mac App store, iBooks Author is an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad. With galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, and more, these books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could.
You can see the whole classy video and advertisement here.
So far so good. And we’re really excited to start playing with it. Because, trust me, ebook publishing needs a tool like this. We’ve been struggling with a clunky, awkward epub conversion for our first book and are longing for a viable WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) platform to work with.
But wait… the final result is only for iPad. So, already we’re seeing this get proprietorial. And probably unrealistic. In all our travels to conferences and schools around the world, we have yet to see a class where every single student had an iPad. They exist, but it is far from being the norm, especially in the field of English Language Teaching. So we can’t see this working on a large scale in the short term.
In addition, to distribute the book you need to go through Apple too. So, more control there. As they say themselves: “Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution”. Hmmm… would our book 52 make it past their radar?
One of our colleagues, Marcos Benevides, hit the nail on the head about this in a discussion on Facebook.
Apple isn’t the only player in town – at least it won’t be for long – but it does tend to set the tone, and the tone they tend to set is not conducive to either free commerce nor expression of ideas. (…) Apple is in fact trying to reserve the exclusive right to sell content produced in Author. That’s is like MS saying that you can’t sell a Word file except through them. That’s ridiculous.
So, two cheers for a great leap that makes it easier for people to create good looking materials. But the round is not about to switch everything to iBooks author as it stands. Ideally, we’ll publish our titles in a variety of formats, including iBooks. It’s a bit of a drag to do it this way, and it does take longer. But until the rest of the world adopts Apple, or the vast majority of teachers and students own an iPad, there’s no other way.
Or so we think right now. It’s early days. Have any of you played with iBooks Author yet? Care to share the experience?
I’ve downloaded the software iBooks Author. Really impressive!
Yes, it’s Apple again with its own agenda, but I’m hoping it will be a big push to do something different, engaging in the publishing market in all levels, be it big publishers and independent writers. There’ a huge gap between thentabletsnin the market and the current features in ebooks. The interactive potential should be explored, and I will give it a try. I still don’t knowmhowmit would be if I decided to publish my own textbook via iTunes…
iBooks Author looks great, but Apple’s lock-down approach means that this will get limited traction in education outside of the USA, imho. There are plenty of much cheaper tablets on the market, the Kindle Fire being just one of them, and I suspect Amazon and others are just one step behind in creating a similar ebook authoring tool. Amazon is of course equally proprietal, but let’s see what Google has up its sleeve. I suspect that we’ll see a range of good ebook authoring tools for a variety of platforms in the near future. This is a market that has the potnetial to shift a lot of moolah ( esp in the K12 market), so I suspect Apple will have competition soon enough…
Folks,
There is so much to write about this that a simple blog comment won’t really do it, but I do have a few things to add…
Yes, it’s proprietary, and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it. It does, however, make amazing books in very little time, and if you’re not in it for the profit, you’re perfectly at liberty at to distribute the books you create in any way you see fit – I sent one to a friend on Friday. So it’s not doom and gloom – only for those wishing to make money. I quote from the Apple site:
“Only material that you intend to sell commercially has to be sold via iTunes. All other content is free to distribute to whoever you want on whatever devices you want (…) Output formats include PDF”.
And what of that money? Well, Apple have capped books made this way to a maximum of US$15, which rather flies in the face of the US$75 that many textbooks cost in the States. And that’s where the economics do work out – if you buy a few of those textbooks each year, you’re soon spending enough to buy an iPad and a set of cheaper textbooks. Publishers seem to agree with this – authors do not, apparently…
Of course this isn’t going to work, say, in Vietnam – but then neither is the Kindle or the Fire or a ‘cheap Android tablet’, and now we’re really back to the age old discussion of the digital haves and have nots, and ‘merely haggling over the price’, as the old anecdote goes.
Amazon Market Place is not an open place, nor is the Kindle publishing place, either. What you gain in perceived freedom with Android, you lose in actual quality, control of other parts of the ecosystem, compromised apps that steal your credit card details, and more.
Since acquiring a new Android tablet recently I’ve been hard-pushed to find a set of apps of the same quality as the suite I can find for the iOS platform. In many ways I like the fact that Apple has some kind of quality control mechanism – it stops the dross.
So what does this all mean? In the short term it means that many students in the US are going to avoid breaking their backs with a backpack full of heavy books and are going to have an ultimately cheaper ‘textbook experience’. That textbook experience is likely to be a lot more interesting than the printed versions of the same books.
In the medium term it means that the alternative community (Android, Open Source…) is going to have to design something that will cater to this need to publish something other than reams and reams of Times New Roman black text on a white background – the traditional epub (whether we like it nor not) is not going to last beyond the middle of this decade.
And in the long term, well… this is just the beginning. And much as it is easy to diss Apple for ‘proprietorial’, closed shop attitudes to a lot of what they produce, you can be sure of one thing – that without Apple much of this innovation wouldn’t exist, or would have taken a lot longer to come about. And of course we all have a choice – if we feel so strongly about how terrible it all is, we can simply give our iPads away and walk away back to the the monochrome world of no interaction.
For the The Round it means (I suspect) a lot of work – the ePub version of, say, 52, will be black text on a white background. But if you’re going to put out a version using iBooks Author, there’s no reason not to include some video material, images, diagrams, handouts, quizzes… And so the struggle begins. It’s going to be a ling few years while this one plays out.
Good luck!
Gavin
Is capping textbooks at US$15 really such a big deal? In future, students will be able to ‘borrow’ them for free from university e-libraries.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/26/living/digital-libraries/index.html
I’ve just been through this process of looking at what’s available as I have a definite product in mind (two in fact). I too stopped with iBooks when I realised that the output was limited to Apple products. I think I may have found something that will do in epub bud as it seems to allow for output to many different media. I also looked at interactive pdfs but a pdf always looks like a pdf and all that something like Issu.com does is add a swishing sound as you turn the pages and hide the pdf frame.
I’m looking for audio file integration and ideally some sort of mouseover for glossary items. This is a language book aimed at Danish pensioners who by and large don’t have iPads though I guess many more of them do now after Christmas. It’s meant to be accessible for them when they are on their hols hence it should be mobile. I guess we are not being overly ambitious in terms of interactivity but in spite of the lovliness of iBooks Author which is now sitting on my daughter’s Mac, I think I’m still looking for the ideal tool.