At the iBooks Author launch in January, PW spoke with a number of digital developers who were impressed with the software, but dubious of a proprietary format, emphasizing that despite its utility and convenience, iBooks Author was a thinly veiled effort to lock publisher content into a single retail channel. Among the titles are Michelle Obama’s American Grown (Random House, $14.99), as well as George Harrison’s Living in the Material World (Abrams, $14.99), edited by Olivia Harrison.Ĭonversations with such publishers as DK Publishing, Sourcebooks, Disney Worldwide Publishing, and NBC Publishing indicate that the format has become a software developer’s hit, and publishers are using iBooks Author to create an impressive selection of enhanced e-books with everything from photographs, sound, and animation to video footage-it’s free to use, though any content created using it must be sold only via the iBookstore. The books are coming from a variety of sources, including big six publishers, self-published authors, small publishers, app developers and TV networks. Since iBooks Author was released, hundreds of books created with the authoring tool are being sold through the iBookstore in a variety of categories, including travel, children’s, cooking, music instruction, gaming strategy, biography, entertainment and other categories. Those using iBooks Author are even okay with the fact that the titles they create can only be sold in the iBookstore. Almost a year later, the iBookstore offers a steadily growing list of books “Made with iBooks Author,” and is being used to create a growing number of visually oriented titles. Initially aimed at the textbook market-though at the launch Apple’s Phil Shiller also said iBooks Author could be used to create any kind of book-over the past year iBooks Author has been adopted by a wide-ranging and growing number of trade book publishers as well as educational publishers. The alteration certainly softens the blow by explicitly exempting those alternative formats, but the root issue-that interactive iBooks can be sold only on the iBookstore-hasn’t changed.When iBooks Author, Apple’s multimedia e-book authoring tool, was unveiled in January, it was hailed for how easy it is to use and its ability to create rich, multimedia, and interactive educational content. It remains to be seen whether the change to the license agreement will appease those who found the initial version objectionable. ![]() Presumably, were your illicit ebook sales to come to Apple’s attention, the company would urge you neither to pass Go, nor to collect $200. There’s no technological reason why you couldn’t use iBooks Author to create an interactive ebook and start selling the title to iPad users from a store or website of your own choosing-it’s just that doing so would be in direct violation of the EULA. ibooks books isn’t one that the company can implement on a strictly technical level. In contrast to Apple’s App Store policies, the rule regarding where you can sell. In many ways, the contentions echoed previous criticisms of the company’s iOS App Store, which has a similar restriction-albeit one enforced by technology rather than by licensing. ![]() The original terms of the iBooks Author license agreement were the subject of much dispute, with some suggesting that it signaled nefarious lock-in practices by Apple, and others arguing that the terms were not unreasonable, given that Apple had made the tool for producing these interactive ebooks freely available.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |