Ibooks Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

iBooks Author 1.01 out with updated EULA

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Feb 3rd, 2012)

An incremental release for iBooks Author has been released with changes to the program's EULA. The update is 143.50 MB, which seems pretty hefty for a EULA change. The change is an important one though, clarifying that Apple has rights over the format a book is in, not the content. If someone ...

iBooks Author Challenge: Adding spelling quizzes to iBooks

by Erica Sadun (Feb 3rd, 2012)

Dave Caolo and I were chatting this morning about iBooks and spelling. "It's not my daughter's favorite subject," he said, "and I'm looking for a way to make it more appealing to her." He asked if there could there be any way to incorporate spelling quizzes into iBooks via Author. The answer is, ...

Using iBooks Author to produce a comic

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Jan 25th, 2012)

When iBooks Author was released last week, I saw the potential for using it to port the webcomic I co-create to the iPad to go along with our upcoming print edition. I'm not alone, as Richard Stevens of Diesel Sweeties immediately took the chance to test iBooks Author by creating an ebook with the ...

iBooks Author owns your format, not your content

by Erica Sadun (Jan 24th, 2012)

There's been a lot of heat and fury surrounding the iBooks Author terms and conditions ever since the service was introduced last week. To boil the controversy down to basics, Apple has introduced a private protocol extension that takes EPUB to the next generation. And then they created a business ...

Students demonstrate innovative iPad book page flip

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jan 24th, 2012)

One major complaint about reading an eBook is the experience; holding an iPad is just not the same as holding a book and thumbing through the pages. This complaint may lose some of its weight if the folks at the KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence can get their patented Smart ...

Estimated 350,000 iBooks textbooks downloaded in three days

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jan 23rd, 2012)

Apple's textbook endeavor may be off to a better start than anyone expected. According to Global Equities Research, a firm that tracks iBook sales, iTunes customers downloaded over 350,000 textbooks in the first three days of availability. The system also logged 90,000 downloads of iBooks Author, ...

iBooks Author: An ebook publisher looks at Apple's textbook creation app

by Steven Sande (Jan 23rd, 2012)

TUAW's Erica Sadun and I are ebook publishers. Late last year, we started up an ebook publishing company -- Sand Dune Books -- and were fortunate to hit a publishing home run right off the bat with our book "Talking to Siri." Since we're familiar with the tools used to create documents for ...

Why McGraw-Hill is selling iBooks for $15

by Chris Rawson (Jan 19th, 2012)

The announcement this morning that textbooks would be sold through the iBookstore wasn't especially surprising. But the price was; full-featured multimedia electronic textbooks being offered for no more than US$15 is exactly the kind of disruptive shakeup the industry needed. While only the K-12 ...

Apple posts video of education event

by Chris Rawson (Jan 19th, 2012)

Apple has posted a video of the education event it held earlier today. The video is available for streaming on Apple's site, or you can download a higher quality version from iTunes. This is Apple's first public event since October's introduction of the iPhone 4S. In this video you'll see the ...

iBooks Author accounts are free, existing developers need a new account

by Chris Rawson (Jan 19th, 2012)

Setting up an account to publish books to the iBookstore has always been free, and the new iBooks Author tool has brought that fact into the spotlight. Self-publishing books to the iBookstore does still have a few hurdles you have to leap through, however. As AppleInsider points out, for iOS and ...

iBooks 2 showcased with preview of E.O. Wilson biology textbook

by Kelly Guimont (Jan 19th, 2012)

As part of today's education announcement, you can pick up a preview of the biology textbook book E. O. Wilson's Life on Earth as a free download from the iTunes store. Requirements for this title are an iPad running iOS 5 and the latest iBooks version, the newly released iBooks 2. Parts of this ...

iBooks Author makes its debut today for creating ebooks (Updated)

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Jan 19th, 2012)

Apple has announced the free iBooks Author, an OS X application for creating any type of ebook. As with Pages, a number of templates are available for authors to use to get started with making a book. With a tap, they can be filled with stock text. Elements such as audio and video can be ...

Apple's press event is getting "overhyped"

by Dave Caolo (Jan 17th, 2012)

As anticipation builds for Apple's January 19 press event, the tech web has latched onto the notion of "GarageBand for iBooks," suggesting that Apple will release iBook creation tools to the public. Ars Technica believes it's true, while Philip Elmer-Dewitt does not. Interestingly, both opinions ...

How Apple iBooks needs to compete with Amazon: Cross-platform support

by Erica Sadun (Jan 6th, 2012)

Amazon has trailblazed; Apple has followed. Apple's iBooks program currently allows authors to self-publish ebooks. Authors create their own business built around iTunes Connect, just as they do for self-published apps. So where does Apple have room to improve? What follows is one of several ...