News from 'The Apple Blog'

While it remains to be seen if Apple’s iBooks app and the iBookstore will be able to transform the print industry, they both have ignited a spark that makes reading more fun. The idea of reading on mobile devices is not new. Devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony eReader have been around for a while, but with the buzz surrounding iBooks sparking more interest, are digital books worth it?

The Beginning of the Digital Revolution

When Apple launched the iTunes Store in 2003, Steve Jobs made the case for why digital downloads would be the future. At the time, it was fairly easy to illegally download music through services like Napster or Kazaa. However, Jobs felt that people would pay a price, very reasonably set at 99 cents, to download music that was great quality and featured intact metadata and gorgeous album artwork. But does the same argument extend to digital books? The current offerings on the iBookstore seem to disagree.

Limitations of the ePub Format

There’s a few considerations to keep in mind, such as selection and format. When the iTunes Store first launched, its catalog only contained 200,000 titles. Seven years later, the catalog features over 11 million titles. While Apple hasn’t released a specific number, its website says the iBookstore features tens of thousands of titles with more arriving daily. Still for most, the selection feels a bit limited. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to replace your entire library with e-books soon.

Another consideration is formatting. A lot of digital content like books and documents are in PDF format. This is great as this format can maintain the exact structure, graphics, typeface and colors from the original source material. However, there are some trade offs. For example, zooming on a PDF document, especially on an iPad, will require you to scroll up and down, or even worse left and right, just to view everything on one page. This doesn’t make for a natural reading experience.

Content on the iBookstore is delivered in ePub format, which is essentially an XML-based web page. By using a standards-compliant format (and we all know how Apple loves open standards), the ePub format supports benefits like being able to resize text or switch typefaces. This works because the iBooks app can simply modify the stylesheet applied to the document. When you make these changes, it’s easy for the iPad to reflow the content onto additional pages if needed. But sometimes this can get a bit wonky (yes, that’s a technical term).

First, custom typefaces are not supported in iBooks. While Safari on the iPad itself will support font embedding, iBooks misses out on this feature.

Another issue is images which are displayed in-line with the text content. What this means is in an original book, you might have a few photos out to the side of a paragraph but on the iPad, they’ll just be displayed one right after the other, mixed in with the narrative. For some types of content, this may be a non-issue, but for others where the page structure is essential to the reading experience, this can be problematic.

Both of these are the top reasons why you don’t see periodicals available through the iBookstore. Imagine the implications this causes for technical books or textbooks. Isn’t the education market supposed to be a big market for this device?

Some Potential Solutions

There are some potential solutions to this. Publishers could simply display some pages as single images, as this would maintain formatting, but accessibility features and the ability to bookmark and change text sizes would be lost.

Another solution would be that authors could release specific apps for these titles. Some have followed this route, but managing more than a handful of these apps really begins to clutter up the device and suddenly, the simplicity of the iBooks app for managing your content is gone.

Since ePub is an open e-book standard, there is hope that future versions will be able to address these issues. Likewise, the iBooks app itself can also be updated to add additional functionality, however, once you’ve bought a book, you own it. Unlike how Apple offered users to upgrade to iTunes Plus to get higher bit-rate versions of their songs, its unlikely that Apple will go back and update older titles or offer “plus” versions of some of these books.

Instead, Apple is being more selective about which titles are showing up on the iBookstore. Obviously, there are no periodicals. You could argue that the iBookstore is intended for books only, but I really think that’s just the beginning, similar to how the iTunes Store began with music videos before adding TV shows and then movies. But could Apple release a different app to manage periodicals and newspapers? Perhaps and so there is yet another solution.

Regardless, the feasibility of converting your entire book collection to e-books is unlikely in the short-term, either because of a lack of content or simply because e-books are not worthy replacements of the books on your shelves. The ePub format itself still has a number of issues to address before printed books become a proverbial page from the past.

Have you used the iBooks app or the iBookstore? What are your thoughts on the ePub format? Is it sufficient enough to replace your library? Share your thoughts in the comments and tell us what you think.

News from 'The Apple Blog'

It may not be ready in time for the launch of the iPad, but Amazon wants you to know that its Kindle app will be worth the wait. That’s why it’s created a special preview page of the upcoming software, dubbed “Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers” with “Including the iPad” in much smaller font beside that primary title.

So its clear that while Amazon wants to capitalize on the iPad’s hype and pre-release popularity, it also doesn’t want to go as far as helping Apple convey the impression that it’s the only tablet game in town. To me, the “Including the iPad” sounds like a begrudging admission of the “I was wrong and you were right” variety.

Of course, it might just be that Amazon would like to appeal to the widest group of potential customers possible, while at the same time acknowledging that Apple is likely to win the brand recognition fight in that particular category. Whatever the marketing logic, the actual software Amazon is previewing looks to be pretty fantastic, especially for those (like me) who are already hardware Kindle owners.

First, the Kindle tablet app will offer Whispersync services, which means you can pick up where you last left off reading, no matter which device you happened to be using. I can’t count how many times I’ve used this between my Kindle 2 and my iPhone, so I can’t imagine it being any less useful with my iPad when it finally graces these Canadian shores.

The app will also synch your notes and highlights and bookmarks across all compatible devices, including the recently released Kindle for Mac software, which can read notes and bookmarks, but not make new ones of its own as of yet.

Visually, the Kindle app looks like what you’d expect. Page turn animations are included, or you can turn them off if you’re not so crazy about mimicking a paper reading experience on your digital devices, which I most definitely am not. You can also change font size and color, and background color in order to make the reading experience more comfortable.

Kindle for tablets also supports full color images and graphics, which is great news not only for fans of comics and graphic novels, which haven’t really been a great option on the Kindle thus far, but also for textbooks, recipe books, and some more adventurous fiction that uses in text images and font color changes as narrative devices.

Finally, you’ll be able to shop in the Kindle store via a built-in web view, so you can indulge all those buying impulses on the fly instead of having to wait till you have access to a full computer. All-in-all, it sounds like it’ll give my Kindle 2 a run for its money, even with potentially eye-straining backlighting.

News from 'The Apple Blog'

How do you control what will and won’t appear on your brand new platform on launch day if you’re Apple, without outright banning apps in a way that might invite accusations of attempting to start a monopoly? If it’s the e-book market you’re after, apparently all you have to do is limit pre-release device access.

Amazon was not one of the select few companies that got access to pre-launch hardware with regards to iPad development. Neither was Barnes & Noble. That honor was reserved for others, like Major League Baseball, the New York Time and the Wall Street Journal. None of which, you’ll note, directly compete for dollars with anything Apple will be offering on the platform.

Since Amazon and Barnes & Noble won’t be able to test their e-reader apps on actual iPads prior to its launch, neither will be offering the software for download on launch day. Sure, they could use the virtual iPad development tool now included with the iPad SDK, but a smooth virtual experience doesn’t necessarily guarantee the effectiveness of the real thing. Accordingly, the booksellers will wait until they can check final versions on iPads, which will only happen after the street date, before submitting iPad-specific apps to Apple.

This will give Apple a valuable head-start when it comes to selling books on the iPad. There’s almost no question that its own iBookstore will be ready for the launch, though it will only be available as a download, and not pre-loaded on devices. The B&N and Amazon iPhone apps will be available, of course, and compatible with the iPad, but they probably won’t be that appealing running in the iPad software’s shoehorned compatibility modes.

Apple needs the time it will gain as the sole iPad-specific bookseller thanks to this shrewd move. The e-book market is one of the few where it will actually be playing catch-up. Amazon in particular will have a built-in user base at launch, as owners of its Kindle devices and those who’ve already built up a library on the iPhone and computer versions of its software could well be reluctant to start again with another seller, in the same way that Canon DSLR owners generally won’t switch to Nikon camera bodies since they lose the use of all their lenses.

My guess is that since Apple is launching iBooks in the U.S. only so far, its main concern isn’t really a customer-grab from Amazon and others already in the business. I’d say Cupertino is more interested in the extremely large potential marketshare that remains in the form of people who haven’t yet gotten on the e-book bandwagon. Just like with gaming, Apple will be looking to convert casuals who adopt its platform for other reasons, and I’d be surprised if we didn’t see them become an industry leading force overnight all over again in this new arena.