The Atlantic, a purveyor of high-tone, long-form, magazine-type literature, is launching a new division for e-books.

Called, ever so colorfully, “The Atlantic Books,” the new product line will include nonfiction reads between 10,000 words and 30,000 words and will first be featured as the Kindle Singles. Later, the e-books will also be made available elsewhere.

In addition to original pieces created solely for this new endeavor, The Atlantic Books will also include hand-picked classic selections from The Atlantic‘s vast catalog of journalism, memoirs, and narrative nonfiction.

“The launch of The Atlantic Books reflects our commitment to innovation in publishing in the service of great journalism and storytelling,” said The Atlantic president M. Scott Havens in a statement on the news.

Just last month, the media company announced a partnership with Longreads, a web startup focusing on, duh, longer-form online content.

As other print publications struggle to maintain great, expensive content in an age of changing economics and reader habits, it’s heartening to watch an older institution gamely try new things.

The Atlantic was founded in 1857 in Boston as a literal and cultural commentary magazine. Its long list of luminary founders includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

In 2009, the publishers launched The Atlantic Wire, a website to aggregate opinion, editorial, and news from a wide range of reputable sources.

Matt MacInnis has an ax to grind with a certain digital publishing giant, and he isn’t trying to hide it.

The founder and chief executive of the digital book company Inkling calls Amazon’s e-books “glorified $10 text files.”

While he acknowledges Amazon’s place in popularizing e-books, he also believes the company has been holding back digital publishing for years. Now, after helping to popularize digital textbooks and digital travel guides, MacInnis thinks he finally has the tools to make Inkling a threat to Amazon.

Today the company is announcing Inkling Habitat, a cloud-based collaborative publishing environment that lets anyone make professional-looking digital books.

“We’ve been working over the last three years on a whole set of problems to move the industry forward. … Looking at the current model that exists today [the Amazon model] is cringe inducing,” MacInnis told VentureBeat in an interview on Monday.

With Inkling Habitat and the recently-launched Inkling Content Discovery Platform, which allows search engines to index entire digital books and lead consumers to purchase them, the company aims to show publishers how they could be better off outside of Amazon’s walled garden. (Amazon’s Kindle books aren’t indexable by Google and other search engines, which makes them practically invisible.)

The announcement comes only a few hours after competitor Kno announced a new product to turn PDFs into interactive e-books.

It makes sense for the CEO of a digital publishing company to view Amazon as a rival, but MacInnis’s tone now feels far more aggressive than in the past — perhaps born out of confidence. He tells me that he’s “blown away” by the results of Inkling’s Content Discovery Platform.

“The conversion rate is so good we’re scared it’s not real,” MacInnis said. “We’re basically killing the traditional model of conversion rates. … Publishers love it since it give them an end-run around Amazon, and people love it since they can search for content on Google like they do every day.”

Now with Inkling Habitat, even more publishers will be able to create professional-quality digital books on Inkling’s platform. Most important, they will also be able to reap the benefits of the insane conversion rates the company is seeing via Google. So far, all of Inkling’s publishing partners have approved Google’s indexing, except for the higher-ed publisher Pearson.

Feature-wise, Habitat lets publishers collaborate on a digital book from anywhere in the world, it lets them integrate a wide variety of media, and it also lets them easily publish to multiple platforms with a single click. While digital publishing software like iBooks has remained fairly traditional — with all of its files sitting on your desktop, and most of the creation work left up to a single person — Habitat is built for a more modern publishing environment that’s collaborative and readily accessible anywhere.

So what took so long for Inkling to allow search engines to index its wares? MacInnis explained that the company has actually been working on it for years, but there were five big reasons it was difficult:

1. Inkling needed to have a secure web reader (which launched last year).
2. It needed to let people access content without logging in.
3. Inkling needed to offer structured content, and not just have the books appear as a bag of words.
4. It needed to be able to sell the content in parts — for example, chapters or portions of books, as well as the entire book.
5. Finally, Inkling had to have the contracts and digital publishing rights in place to make such a deal with Google.

Almost four years since Inkling’s launch in 2009, the company finally had all the pieces in place to open up its content and fully realize the potential of its platform.

San Francisco, Calif-based Inkling has raised a round of $17 million in 2011 from Tenaya Capital, Jafco Ventures, Pearson Education, and Sequoia Capital.

Just when you thought you might make it through the rest of your life without ever reading anything other than Facebook updates and the occasional #longread from Slate, Flipboard goes and ruins your party with a books section. What is this, the freakin’ library?

Now, you won’t be reading whole books from inside the Flipboard app; Flipboard’s hooked itself up with Apple’s iBookstore for all that. What you will get is new Flipboard sections to help you browse titles and find books you’ll like.

The feature is launching today with sections on literature, biographies, travel, the culinary arts, etc., all of which add up to a catalog of potential new reading material. The catalog includes synopses of each title and a link to its iBookstore page.

Check ‘er out:

The book catalog will include 25 categories and will roll out initially in 10 countries, including the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain.

This isn’t Flipboard’s first foray into catalog shopping. In September, the company launched a shoppable collection of jeans. We can imagine the company edging its way into more shopping experiences — even app-shopping experiences — as the gift-giving holidays get into full swing over the next few weeks.

Top image courtesy of Oleksandr Lysenko, Shutterstock

Ever since Barnes & Noble debuted its GlowLight Nook e-reader, all eyes have been on Amazon for its upgraded Kindle. Now it looks like Amazon’s backlit e-reader has been leaked, ahead of the company’s media event next week.

The Verge has gotten its hands on a series of images that show off the new Kindle and tout a “Paperwhite” display with an integrated backlight. The new Kindle looks pretty much like Amazon’s existing Kindle Touch, except it sports a darker case and no “home” button below its display.

Amazon’s materials say that the e-reader will have “higher contrast, high resolution, integrated lighting, and eight weeks of battery life,” even if you’re using the integrated light. The Verge notes that the “Paperwhite” branding likely refers to the upgraded E-Ink screen technology over the Kindle’s existing “Pearl” screen.

There don’t seem to be any big surprises with the next Kindle, we figured a self-illuminated model was coming for some time, and improved E-Ink technology simply makes sense. It’s worth noting that this Kindle is touting rear lighting, versus the front lighting of B&N’s Nook with GlowLight.

Given the massive success of the Kindle Fire last year, I suspect Amazon is spending plenty more time on tablets rather than its standalone e-readers. We’re also expecting an improved Kindle Fire at next week’s event (we saw a glimpse of it yesterday), which will likely be the star of the show.

Bookseller Barnes & Noble has debuted Nook for Web, a way to read Nook titles through a browser without having to download software, the company announced today.

Barnes & Noble is in the middle of an e-reading war with Amazon and its Kindle reader, which has apps across nearly every platform, including PCs, Mac, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. So B&N needs to stay on top of the game in terms of its offerings. Unfortunately, the new Nook app does not work for the iPad’s mobile Safari browser, but you can still download the Nook app for iPad for reading on the device.

Nook for Web’s features include:

• Enjoy free samples of the majority of Nook Books and begin reading with just a click on the “Read Instantly” icon. There’s no need to sign in, create an account or download additional software in order to sample content. Nook for Web supports all PC and Mac-supported Web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

• Get lost in a great read with the realistic book-like layout, including clear page numbers at the bottom of each screen and an innovative slider allowing users to easily track the number of pages remaining in a chapter or quickly scroll to another section.

• Customize the reading experience using the intuitive navigation bar. Choose between eight fonts and eight font sizes and a single- or double-page layout. Simply collapse the navigation bar once preferences are selected to reveal a clean, easy-to-read page.

• Rate, review, and share thoughts or recommend books via Twitter, Facebook, or e-mail without even leaving the book.

• Access more information about the book while reading, plus thousands of helpful editorial and customer reviews at your fingertips.

• Learn what to read next with personalized recommendations from Barnes & Noble’s expert booksellers — from must-read new releases to up-and-coming authors — all in the customizable Shop window.

• Shop from the ever-expanding Nook Store, buy Nook Books in seconds (the majority for $9.99 or less), and select purchases right from your personal Nook Library to open and begin reading from any Web browser.

If you try out Nook for Web before July 26, you will get six free titles, including The Vow, Sex and the City, and Map of Bones.

Photo credit: Barnes & Noble

Apple and a number of publishers are officially being called to court on June 3, 2013 to sort out the issue of e-book price fixing, as ruled by Manhattan-based judge Denise Cote.

The Department of Justice sued Apple for allegedly colluding with five book publishers — Penguin Group, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster — to fix the prices of e-books. It did this by dictating that any publisher who sold e-books through iTunes could not sell its books at a lower price in other marketplaces, such as Amazon’s. The DOJ said this type of behavior disrupts competition that naturally drives down prices, but the group claimed it was actually breaking apart a monopoly that Amazon held on e-book prices.

“The DOJ’s accusation of collusion against Apple is simply not true,” said Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr in a statement at the time. “The launch of the iBookstore in 2010 fostered innovation and competition, breaking Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry. Since then customers have benefited from eBooks that are more interactive and engaging. Just as we’ve allowed developers to set prices on the App Store, publishers set prices on the iBookstore.”

Thus far, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster have all settled with the Department of Justice. Apple, Penguin, and Macmillan remain to fight the suit next June. The group will face not only the DOJ, but 16 states that also filed antitrust lawsuits.

via Bloomberg Businessweek; image via Apple.com

Looks like somebody really “Nookd” this one up. A recent Nook version of Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel War and Peace replaces the word “kindled” with the word “Nookd,” an apparent attempt to get rid of references to e-book’s competitor Kindle.

The bizarre mistake was first noticed on the Ocracoke Island Journal blog. Blogger Philip Howard writes:

I had read about half of the novel when I was given the gift of a Nook, the e-reader from Barnes and Noble. Although I am committed to supporting my neighborhood independent book store (Books to be Red), and enjoying honest-to-goodness books, the .99 Nook edition was so lightweight that it has made reading War and Peace a genuine pleasure. For those of you who have not tackled this tome as yet, it is a page-turner.

As I was reading, I came across this sentence: “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern….” Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text.

For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: “It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern….”

A commenter on Howard’s post explains that it was probably an error by publisher Superior Formatting Publishing rather than Barnes & Noble. Most likely, the publisher created a Kindle version of the book first. Once it decided to move the 1,100+ page book over to the Nook platform, it lazily copied and pasted “Nook” for “Kindle” without realizing the word “kindle” was used eight times in the translated text.

We’re sure there are worse mistakes to be found in e-books, but this is certainly one of the more outlandish ones. I’m sure Mr. Tolstoy (pictured) would not be impressed.

Leo Tolstoy painting: Ilya Efimovich Repin

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I was flabbergasted at the news that Microsoft had invested $300 million into Barnes & Noble’s Nook business, making the e-reader subsidiary, at a $1.7 billion valuation, worth more than B&N itself.

Sure, Microsoft has a penchant for investing in promising also-rans: Nokia, for instance.

But the Nook has so far to go to be competitive with the dominant player in this market that it’s not even funny. The only advantage the Nook has over Amazon’s Kindle is that it can display EPUB files, the open format used by a large number of publishers and e-book readers, whereas the Kindle cannot.

That would be a trivial feature for Amazon to add, if it ever decided that EPUB support was a competitive feature. For now, though, it’s content to divide the market with its own, proprietary KF8 and AZW formats. Because Amazon readers are the only devices that read those formats, and because files in those formats are (apart from some hacking) only readable on Kindles, Amazon knows it has a captive market. Once you start stocking your library with Amazon’s e-books, you won’t want to switch to a different kind of e-book reader on which you can’t read them.

I say this as an early proponent of the Nook. I bought one, and used it for nearly a year, until I got fed up with its lack of features and frequent lockups. There was only one software update during that year, and it didn’t fix the shortcoming I cared most about, which is the ability to email documents to the device so I don’t have to sync it with my computer. Eventually, my wife gave me a Kindle, and I haven’t looked back since.

Here’s a short list of advantages Amazon’s Kindle has over the Nook:

• Variety. The Kindle is available in a wide variety of form factors, with and without keyboards. The Nook’s designs are more limited.
• Margin. Amazon can afford to sell its e-readers and its Kindle Fire tablet at very low (or even negative) margins because it knows that they could essentially be physical shopping carts for purchasing anything Amazon sells. All Barnes & Noble can hope to sell are magazines, newspapers, and books.
• Delivery. Both readers offer free wireless delivery of books via 3G networks or Wi-Fi. But only the Kindle gives you an email address so you can send files to your reader.
• Developer Network. That email address renders the Kindle far more accessible to developers like Instapaper, which can easily integrate their reading apps with the Kindle by arranging an email delivery to the customer’s Kindle address. Add in Amazon’s extensive Android store, and the developer network looks even bigger.

Microsoft might be planning to fold the Nook into its plan for Windows 8 dominance, by turning it into a Windows-powered platform. That would tie it into the vast universe of Windows developers as well as the cloud-based assets of Skydrive, so you could store your books in the same place you store your files and photos. That would be smart. It would also be a major overhaul for the device.

Microsoft might figure that $300 million is a small price to pay for a piece of a lucrative market. Even in second place, it’s conceivable that the Nook will still generate revenues for its parent companies in the form of e-book sales. As a book retailer, Barnes & Noble is a far less threatening figure to book publishers than Amazon is, so it might have an edge in signing contracts with those publishers.

Still, I’m doubtful that the e-reader market is anything more than a temporary stopover on the way to a multi-screen, tablet-centric future. I figure this market has three to five years left in it, tops. Most people will elect to buy full-color tablets, now and in the future. Eventually, those of us who like reading on E Ink screens will be able to choose those as an option for a second (or third) “satellite” screen that’s connected wirelessly to our main tablets or notebooks. Where will the single-purpose reading devices be then?

In all, the Nook investment seems like a strange sideline for a company that already has its hands full trying to drive a wedge into a smartphone and tablet market, where it also faces extremely long odds. How many markets can Microsoft hope to open up simply by pouring in huge amounts of development time and marketing dollars?

This isn't going to end well.

The recent anti-trust suit against the big five book publishers reminds me of the scene in the movie Titanic where the lifeboats are pulling away from the gasping survivors in the water. We all know what’s going to happen and it’s painful to watch.

What surprises me is how little discussion there is about what happens to the authors in all of this. For sure, advances are going down. Way down. But that has been happening for a while. Even before the Kindle, Amazon was dominating print sales, which meant the publishers had a lot less control over how their book sold.

Publishers have no idea how drive online sales

For years, as book sales moved increasingly online, the responsibility of the sale has increasingly moved to the author. Publishers can’t drive sales because they have no idea who is buying their books online. With offline bookstores, publishers knew the location of their buyers and based on location, they could extrapolate demographics. With online sales, print publishers have no location-based information, and Amazon doesn’t release any customer data to publishers.

Publishers have resorted to un-trackable promotion such as print ads, and television. While book publishers have no way to track direct traffic from television spots, bloggers do, and bloggers know that TV and radio translate to much fewer clicks than online publications. This is because, for most people, there are simply too many steps from hearing someone speak on NPR to going to the person’s web site.

I know this because my personal blog gets about a million views a month. When I write a post like this, promoting a book, I can tell exactly how many sales I made — more than 1,000, in this case.

This is really bad news for publishers, because I make almost as much in commission from Amazon when I sell a book I didn’t write as I would make on the sale of one of my own books after the publisher takes out their cut.

So book publishers are largely ineffective at selling books, and they can’t get better because Amazon is not sharing data that would reveal exactly what works and what doesn’t.

The list matters more than the advance

Right now the only non-celebrity authors who can get book deals are people who can drive their own sales figures, almost always through online means. Besides, that, most nonfiction authors are not making their money from their books. Their books are more marketing tools for their higher profit-margin products:  speaking or consulting.

That means that people who are getting book deals need their mailing list more than they need their book advance. People who write nonfiction books will make more money from their mailing list than from any Amazon-whipped book industry advance. The problem is that Amazon keeps the list.

So here’s what happens. An author who is good at driving book sales gets an advance from the publisher. The publisher has no idea how to market a book online so the author is driving most of the sales on Amazon.

But only Amazon knows the email addresses of the people who bought the book. Moreover, Amazon knows what else this customer would want to buy and can sell it to them. Amazon is keeping — stealing, really — the mailing list away from authors.

Pro tip: Go around Amazon

So it would behoove all authors who can sell their book to sell it on their own website and not on Amazon. Amazon is using ebooks as a marketing tool for the Kindle, and if you drive your list to Amazon, you’re merely driving them into Amazon’s Kindle-centric sales funnel.

There is already a trend for authors with their own audience to go around Amazon. Leo Babauta publishes his own books and sells them on his own site. Ramit Sethi not only does that, but it’s hard to find his books to buy on his site because Ramit is one step ahead of everyone. He collects names first and sells books later. And those books are not on Amazon.

Emily Gould is using her reputation online to sell books that she didn’t write. She’s a publisher, of sorts. But she doesn’t sell the ebooks on Amazon.

So the trick is not to write a book and get it published. That’s no longer difficult, or even clever — the whole world has a book today. The real trick is to build your own audience to the point where you can sell directly to them.

That’s much harder to do than publishing a book. But face facts: Building your audience is becoming the only way that makes financial sense to sell books.

In other words, build your own lifeboat, and do it now, before the Titanic sinks.

Penelope Trunk founded Brazen Careerist and two other startups. Her career advice runs in 200 newspapers, and she is the author of a bestselling career advice book. She lives on a farm in Wisconsin and homeschools her sons.

Top image of the Titanic: via Cliff1066/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Inkling’s digital publication platform helped textbook makers move to the iPad. Now, the company is setting its sights on travel with the launch of Frommer’s Day by Day travel guides for the iPad and iPhone.

Travel has traditionally been one of the lowest performing digital content segments, Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis told VentureBeat in an interview yesterday. That’s because many consumers would rather grab a traditional paper travel guide, which they can dog-ear and bookmark as much as they need to, rather than a digital guide that’s harder to navigate (and requires a device that’s more tempting to steal).

Using Inkling’s platform — which allows you to search, bookmark, and navigate through digital content easily — and Frommer’s rich travel information, the new Day by Day books end up being far more useful than a mere paperback. The new Frommer’s digital books also marks the first time Inkling has brought its platform to the iPhone, giving you instant access to all of the content of the iPad version on the go. (An update in a few weeks will add log-in capabilities, which will let you synchronize data between the iPad and iPhone apps.)

The Day by Day digital books retail between $10 and $15, and are available as individual apps and within Inkling’s app. They’re also universal binaries, so you can purchase them once to use them on both your iPhone and iPad. They contain over 650 maps and more than 2,000 Retina Display-ready photos, which makes it easy to plan upcoming trips on the new iPad.

The apps contain both indoor maps for locations like museums, as well as outdoor maps that point to interesting destinations in their respective locations. The maps are entirely local, so you don’t need to worry about having cellular data to view them. The maps don’t take advantage of GPS functionality, because travel maps typically aren’t made to scale, MacInnis said. But Inkling is working on a way to implement accurate GPS within the apps down the line.

In addition to creating notes just for yourself, you can also make them public, which adds an intriguing crowdsourcing element. It brings some of the interesting social elements from sites like TripAdvisor on top of Frommer’s professional travel guide data. Authors can also make their own notes within the digital books.

MacInnis tells me that he used France Day by Day app to plan his honeymoon, and he was particularly surprised by how useful the high-res iPad images were for deciding on which locations to visit.

Looking beyond textbooks and travel, MacInnis says he’s excited to bring O’Reilly’s books to the Inkling platform, starting with the Missing Manual series. He said that readers can expect cool functionality from the digital books. “Why read about Javascript, when you can just run it from within the book,” he said.

San Francisco, Calif-based Inkling was founded in 2009, and raised a round of $17 million last summer from Tenaya Capital, Jafco Ventures, Pearson Education, and Sequoia Capital.

How much is Microsoft afraid of Amazon and its surging Kindle business? Enough to invest $300 million in Barnes & Noble’s new Nook subsidiary.

The deal, announced today, will give Microsoft a significant stake in an established e-reading company, a market where it hasn’t yet made much of an impact. Barnes & Noble hasn’t yet decided on a name for the subsidiary, which will also include the company’s College business segment, but we expect it to harken back to the Nook brand somehow. Microsoft will own 17.6 percent of the new company, which is valued at $1.7 billion.

Notably, the company is valued significantly higher than B&N itself this morning, which now has a market cap of $823.4 million. Shares of B&N were up a whopping 85 percent in pre-market trading at the time of this post.

Not surprisingly, one of the first products from the deal will be a Nook application for Windows 8. That’s something B&N would have likely developed anyway, but with Microsoft’s banking it’ll be able to accelerate development and take advantage of the new tablet features of Windows 8.

The partnership also resolves an ongoing patent dispute between the two companies, according to today’s release: “Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have settled their patent litigation, and moving forward, Barnes & Noble and Newco will have a royalty-bearing license under Microsoft’s patents for its NOOK eReader and Tablet products. This paves the way for both companies to collaborate and reach a broader set of customers.”

The inclusion of B&N’s higher education business also gives Microsoft a gateway into that potentially lucrative market. The subsidiary will push forward B&N’s Nook Study software to deliver digital education goods — which could potentially remove the need for expensive textbooks.

At the moment, it appears this new subsidiary will remain under Barnes & Noble. But it’s not hard to see the pieces being put in place for a larger shift down the line, which could include spinning off the subsidiary entirely, and a potential purchase by Microsoft.

Collusion? What collusion? Apple last night denied the Department of Justice’s antitrust claims that it illegally fixed e-book prices with major publishers, which ultimately made e-books more expensive than they were prior to the launch of Apple’s iBookstore.

Apple is joined by Penguin Group and MacMillan, who are also denying the antitrust claims. HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster, on the other hand, settled with the government on Wednesday morning.

Tom Neumary, a spokesman for Apple, released the following statement last night:

The DOJ’s accusation of collusion against Apple is simply not true. The launch of the iBookstore in 2010 fostered innovation and competition, breaking Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry. Since then customers have benefited from eBooks that are more interactive and engaging. Just as we’ve allowed developers to set prices on the App Store, publishers set prices on the iBookstore.

Following the Department of Justice’s suit, 16 states followed up with lawsuits of their own.

At issue is Apple’s use of an “agency model” to set e-book prices, which gave publishers the ability to control the prices. That’s all well and good, but Apple also arranged it so that the publishers couldn’t offer their e-books cheaper anywhere else on the Web. That quickly led to higher e-book prices on Amazon’s Kindle store. Now that this agency structure is being questioned, we’ll likely finally see e-book prices dip in the next few years.

It’s kind of shocking to think that E-Ink e-book readers have been around for several years, yet nobody has figured out an integrated way to light up the screens. Until now, that is.

Barnes & Noble today is launching a new $139 version of the Nook Simple Touch with technology it’s calling GlowLight. Basically, it’s a built-in light that illuminates the E-Ink screen from above, which means you can now successfully read in bed without the need for a bright light.

B&N built up this device’s launch with a lot of secrecy among the press, but some of that momentum was blown yesterday when store signage revealed the new Nook Simple Touch’s existence. But even though I knew what to expect, the device is still impressive. Finally, you can get an E-ink reader that can light itself without the need for a special case or external light. B&N isn’t alone in this either, TechCrunch reported last week that Amazon is exploring similar technology for the Kindle.

B&N has been working on the technology for over a year, Nook head of user experience Michelle Warvel told VentureBeat in an interview today.

She walked me through an elaborate setup at a New York City hotel that showed off the new Nook’s strengths. First I saw how it compared in direct sunlight against the iPad and Kindle Fire (this was no contest, E-Ink has always been great in sunlight). The new Nook Simple Touch also includes a built-in glare protector, for even better reading in sunlight.

To replicate the bedroom experience, B&N set up a darkened room in the hotel’s penthouse to show off the new GlowLight display. It’s activated by simply holding down the Nook’s home button, and offers plenty of light even at the lower settings. Warvel tells me that the light isn’t a huge battery drain — you can read for 30 minutes a day for an entire month without needing a recharge.

Surprisingly, Barnes & Noble was also able to make the new Nook Simple Touch lighter than its predecessor. The device is now under seven ounces. Warvel stressed the importance of being first to offer an E-Ink reader with a light, as well as the fact that the Nook team paid special attention to the ergonomics of the device and the look of the fonts on the Nook’s screen.

B&N has never been lacking in hardware expertise — just look at how it managed to work with a noted design team for the Nook Color and Nook Tablet — but the company’s e-book ecosystem is still second to Amazon’s Kindle bookstore, in my opinion. Amazon has a wider selection of books, and you also get access to its rich library of Kindle Singles. There was no mention of how B&N would be shaping up its digital bookstore. The entire focus today was on the new hardware.

The new Nook is a big step for Barnes & Noble, but the real question is if consumers will find GlowLight a worthy enough addition to upgrade or change platforms from the Kindle.

The GlowLight-equipped Nook Simple Touch is available for pre-order today for $139 and will be available in early May.

Sixteen states have piled lawsuits on top of Apple, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon and Schuster, four companies which were served with an antitrust lawsuit this morning by the Department of Justice.

The suit is led by Texas and Connecticut, which, unlike the DOJ, are demanding financial damages be paid. Other states include Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont and West Virginia and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

The Department of Justice sued Apple and publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster, and Penguin this morning for its new “agency pricing” model. Apple previously had a flat rate for e-books in iTunes, similar to how it charges a flat $1.29 for most songs in the marketplace. With this new model, publishers are allowed to set their own prices on e-books in iTunes, and give Apple a 30 percent cut of the revenue. In general, this is actually positive for the publishers, but it went a step further. The publishers have been accused of conspiring with Apple to agree to not sell their e-books at a lower price anywhere else. That is to say, if the e-book is listed on iTunes as $13, it can’t be sold on Amazon for $10.

This lowers competition between online marketplaces, and it’s competition that drives prices down for consumers.

Thus far Hachette, Harper Collins and Simon and Schuster are said to have agreed to settle the case with the Department of Justice. Hachette and Harper Collins are the only two to have settled with the states thus far, offering a restitution to consumers. Macmillian, however, says it will follow the cases to court.

“The terms the DOJ demanded were too onerous. After careful consideration, we came to the conclusion that the terms could have allowed Amazon to recover the monopoly position it had been building before our switch to the agency model,” said Macmillan chief executive John Sargent in a letter today, “We made the change to support an open and competitive market for the future, and it worked.”

Court Documents from the Department of Justice

hat tip PaidContent; Justice image via Shutterstock

The U.S. Department of Justice has officially filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and a handful of major book publishers, including Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Penguin.

The DOJ is charging the companies for anti-competitive practices regarding the pricing and sales of e-books, as VentureBeat previously reported. Last year Apple switched its prices structure with publishers to an “agency model,” which allowed those publishers to set their own prices on e-books while giving Apple a standard cut of the revenue.

The portion of the deal in question states that e-books sold through the iTunes store cannot be sold at a lower price anywhere else on the Internet. That’s pretty good move for Apple, because it means that e-books listed in iTunes cannot be undersold. However, it also creates higher prices for consumers and stifles competition.

The DOJ is said to have reached an accord with Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins to settle allegations that they conspired with Apple Inc. to set prices of digital books, according to a Bloomberg report that cites unnamed people familiar with the matter.

The Justice Department has been investigating the matter since last year. Last month, the DOJ warned all the companies involved that an antitrust suit would happen if things didn’t change.

The outcome of the DOJ lawsuit could mean cheaper prices on e-books for consumers from the publishers involved. It could also mean lower revenues for publishers as well as book authors.

We’ve embedded the Justice Department’s full antitrust case document below for further inspection.

In an effort to protect consumers from heightened e-book prices, the Department of Justice could sue Apple Wednesday morning.

The DOJ is concerned with a deal between Apple and five other publishers — Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, Macmillan, and HarperCollins. The deal states that e-books sold through the iTunes store cannot be sold at a lower price anywhere else on the Internet, according to the Wall Street Journal. The deal is a good one for Apple, in that e-books listed in iTunes cannot be undersold. However, it also creates higher prices for consumers and stifles competition.

The Department of Justice launched an investigation into the e-book pricing last year, and eventually threatened the group of six with a lawsuit in March. Reuters is now reporting that, while three of the group agreed to settle the issue, the remaining three — including Apple — could face a lawsuit. The three publishers in favor of a settlement are Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Hachette Book Group, according to another report by the Wall Street Journal.

Apple, which hit a market cap of $600 billion today, can certainly afford the legal fees, but it might not be worth the antitrust battle. Whether Penguin and Macmillan will be involved in the suit remains to be seen.

via Reuters

New data from the Association of American Publishers shows that a lot of y’all got e-readers over the holidays. Year-over-year, e-book sales have skyrocketed, especially for young adult and kids’ titles.

In January 2011, publishers sold 3.9 million children’s and young adults e-books. One year later, that monthly sales figure is up to a whopping 22.6 million.

For the older set, e-books are also showing huge growth, surging from 66.6 million e-books sold in January 2011 to 99.5 million sold in January 2012.

In fact, adult e-books are set to overtake adult paperbacks as the highest volume product for publishers in America. This past January, paperbacks outsold e-books by less than 6 million units; if e-book market growth continues, it will have far outpaced paperbacks to become the number-one category for U.S. publishers.

As it is, e-books accounted for 31.1 percent of all young adult, children’s, and adult book sales in January 2012, up from 24.8 percent in January 2011.

All in all, January 2012 was a good month for publishers, with overall sales up 27 percent and sales in the children’s/young adult category up 80.5 percent.

At VentureBeat HQ, we’re hardly surprised by these stats. We were watching the white-hot e-reader/tablet/hybrid gadgets market between last November and now, and what we saw completely backs up the e-book sales growth.

For example, we noted that tablet ownership doubled over the holidays — a feat that was in no small part due to the wild success of Amazon’s Kindle Fire. Shortly after Kindle Fire pre-sales began in September 2011, the company announced it was selling the device at a rate of one million units per week.

“Kindle Fire is the most successful product we’ve ever launched -– it’s the bestselling product across all of Amazon for 11 straight weeks; we’ve already sold millions of units, and we’re building millions more to meet the high demand,” said Dave Limp, Amazon’s Kindle-focused vice president, shortly before the January e-book sales began.

Top image courtesy of Catherine Murray, Shutterstock

Pottermore was announced last June as a site where Potter fans can interact with each other and as an online place to purchase the books in e-book format. It took a while for that to become a reality, but now the series can be purchased in all formats, including Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Google Play, Sony Reader, and ePub format. Apple’s iBooks is weirdly not a part of this, but those who want to read on an iPad or iPhone can use the general ePub format.

Once you create an account on Pottermore, you can purchase the e-books one at a time or as a collection. The first three books run $7.99 a pop while the last four cost $9.99 each. Buying them all together costs $57.54. Once you purchase an e-book, you’ll be allowed to download it up to eight times in any format.

The e-books do not feature anything new, but the Wall Street Journal says “enhanced editions” with extra videos and audio content might eventually follow.

Pottermore also lets fans purchase digital audio books, though they are not the most economical option. Those cost much more the books themselves, with the first three novels running $29.99 a piece and the last four running $44.99 per audio book. Purchasing them in one collection costs $242.94.

Take a look at the e-book offerings:

Harry Potter animated image: HitoFanart/Deviantart

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon has released a major update to its Kindle iOS app today that will let it take advantage of the new iPad’s Retina Display, fixing an issue some reviewers brought up regarding blurry text on earlier versions of the app.

The Kindle version 3.0 app for iOS also offers a new “cloud view,” which will allow you to easily see all of your Kindle content in the cloud on a single screen. From there, you can download books from the cloud to your device (previously, finding your archived Kindle items was a lot clunkier).

Amazon was wise to update its Kindle app so quickly — the company needs to retain a great reading experience on its apps, otherwise consumers may be tempted to jump over to e-books from iTunes. The new iPad’s ultra-sharp display will make reading text on the tablet practically indistinguishable from reading text on paper (aside from that darn backlight).

You can expect plenty of big iOS apps to see updates over the next few days, thanks to the launch of the new iPad on Friday. I’m personally excited to see Netflix and Hulu make the jump to HD video on the iPad — something that wasn’t possible before because of the low resolution screens of past iPads.

The world’s most valuable company, Apple, is being accused of conspiring with five major book publishers to raise the price of e-books, which could lead to a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice.

The antitrust case deals with Apple’s “agency model” of selling apps and e-books in which the publisher sets its own prices for their products while giving Apple 30 percent of every sale. Yet, Apple placed a stipulation on the book publishers that they cannot sell an e-book title for a lower cost than what’s available through Apple’s iTunes bookstore, according to a Wall Street Journal report that cites unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

The outcome of the DOJ lawsuit threats could mean cheaper prices on e-books for consumers from the publishers involved. It could also mean lower revenues for publishers, which includes Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group; Penguin Group, Macmillan, GmbH, and HarperCollins Publishers.

The DOJ has been investigating e-book pricing since last year. If the news is true, the antitrust lawsuit warning would mean that the DOJ was unable to reach an agreement with both Apple and the publishers on a solution. However, it’s likely that all parties involved will reach a settlement because taking the case to court would be far more expensive and give the companies a dose of negative PR.

Tablet image via Shutterstock

Barnes & Noble’s line of Nook e-reader devices, which first debuted in 2009, are helping the company boost its digital sales of e-books. The Nook also helps Barnes & Noble compete against online retail giant Amazon, which has its own line of Kindle e-readers, as well as a healthy lead in the international market.

The U.S. book company is apparently “putting final touches” on a fifth e-reading device that will be released in spring of 2012, according to a recent New York Times report. The news doesn’t indicate if the new Nook e-reader device will be an e-ink device or an upgraded version of its Android OS-based tablet. But given that the company just released the Nook Tablet, its second Android slate, it’s far more likely that we’ll see a new e-ink device.

The report also indicates that Barnes and Noble is planning to announce a partnership with U.K. book retailer Waterstones, which has over 300 locations. This would line up with comments made in December by Barnes & Noble VP of Digital Content Theresa Horner, who told The BookSeller that the company would be making an international launch in the near future.

It wouldn’t be unheard of for Barnes & Noble to release a new Nook tablet this spring, but I don’t think the company would do so for the specific purpose of entering the international market. If the line of Nooks make it into Waterstone stores, it may be under the same partnership Barnes & Noble has forged with other booksellers here in the U.S. For instance, Books-a-Million sells the Nook line of e-readers without any branding from Barnes & Noble.

We’re reaching out to Barnes and Noble for further comment and will update the post with any addition information.

Apple recently announced iBooks 2 for iPad, which it promises will reinvent the textbook. Some even speculate that it will ignite a revolution in education.

Why? Because iBooks are sleeker, smarter, and equipped with a seemingly endless amount of innovative features, like animation, full screen photos, and videos. It’s no wonder that schools and students are jumping on the iBooks bandwagon (Apple sold nearly 350,000 textbooks in the first three days). iBooks is certainly inventive — but the improvements are evolutionary. Reinventing is a long way from revolutionizing.

The revolution is already at hand, and fortunately for the students of tomorrow, it isn’t iBooks.

By definition, revolutionary ideas throw out the old standard instead of merely reinventing it. iBooks digitizes textbooks, mixing in some rich media, simple quizzes, and a nifty note-tracking system. You can even search! It’s certainly a big improvement over print. But the essence of a textbook remains: a linear, monolithic body of knowledge.

Contrast this with Khan Academy, an online video library that is taking the educational world by storm. Its goal: to provide a world-class, free education to anyone, anywhere, anytime. It launched out of founder Salman Khan’s converted closet. Now, it has delivered more than 115 million lessons to students around the world via short video segments taught by “Sal” himself. While its presentation is engaging, the real impact stems from its ability to organize information into a truly individual experience where you can choose your own learning adventure.

It’s a model that has proven as effective as it is unorthodox: a school without walls, without a curriculum, and without textbooks. It is education unbound. And students are flocking to it.

Khan describes his videos like this:

I teach the way that I wish I was taught. The lectures are coming from me, an actual human being who is fascinated by the world around him… I felt like fascinating and INTUITIVE concepts were almost intentionally being butchered into pages and pages of sleep-inducing text and monotonic, scripted lectures. I saw otherwise intelligent peers memorizing steps and formulas for the next exam without any sense of the intuition or big picture, only to forget everything within a matter of weeks.

While textbooks are part of the problem, they are not the problem. It is education itself that is broken.

The prevailing system breaks the world’s knowledge into linear sections and static formulas. But the way we think isn’t linear—it’s associative. We jump from concept to concept, our brains naturally latching onto the next most interesting idea. The path to knowledge is best approached organically, not prescriptively. Any linear, chapter-based textbook format — even one as snazzy and as engaging as iBooks — is an anachronism.

Sir Ken Robinson, well known for his famous series of TED lectures on education, is critical of what he considers to be our grossly outdated, 19th century model of education. Instead of throwing our efforts into education reform, Robinson advocates that we “disenthrall” ourselves from relics of the past. We need to stop doing things that we have always done, just because we have always done it.

“Reform is no use anymore, because that’s simply improving a broken model . . . What we need is not an evolution; we need a revolution,” he says.

Visionaries like Khan and Robinson have shown the path forward: an education system that treats students like individuals. The future of education will be organic, associative, and explorative. It’s distinctly un-bookish, which means it is also distinctly un-iBookish.

Apple’s iBooks promises that all those “gorgeous” features will make students excited to learn about the solar system. But Apple already (as the saying goes) has an app for that: Star Walk for iPad. It’s an educational astronomy app that, like Khan Academy, promotes learning that is not segmented into parts and bound between two covers (even if they are virtual covers); it is education unbound. That’s the real revolution.

Sal Khan and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia are empowering millions to learn without using a single textbook. They are promoting this learning revolution through self-service and knowledge portals, which lets users pursue the topics that most intrigue them. This sort of divergent thinking about education is the wave of the future, and more organizations should embrace a format that really facilitates long-term learning.

My company’s technical documentation software, Dozuki, is designed to teach people to do the things they want to do, when they want to do it. With iFixit (which runs on Dozuki), we don’t walk people through an entire repair curriculum before we teach them how to fix an iPod. We provide just enough information at the point of need, and give inspired individuals a path to learn more.

Here’s the real key to effective education: Give people the most intuitive, direct path to understanding what they really want. That approach has helped us teach 15 million amateurs to fix complex electronics, and it’s how Salman Khan is systematically revolutionizing education.

Textbooks are a broken form of knowledge acquisition, and it’s not because they’re made of paper. iBooks could have been so much more. Perhaps some day it will be.

Kyle Wiens is the cofounder of iFixit, the online repair manual. He’s currently starting a new technical documentation software company, Dozuki, with the goal of reinventing how companies make their customers awesome.

Top photo by Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat.

For $25 a month, you can stream audio books onto any computer or mobile device through the Audiobooks.com HTML5 web app, which works on most major browsers. Since the books are stored on Audiobooks.com’s servers, you can pause in the middle of a chapter on one gadget and pick up exactly where you left off on any other devices — much the way multi-platform e-book readers like Kindle and Nook work with text. As with all streaming media offerings, a downside to not downloading the files is that you can only listen to books when you have an Internet connection.

Audiobooks.com competitor Audible has similar monthly plans, but with Audible you are limited to a set number of books: one title for $15 a month, or two titles for $23 a month.

The $25 monthly cost for unlimited audio books on Audiobooks.com is steep when you consider that audio books are often eight hours or longer (Moby Dick clocks in at 25 hours and 30 minutes long), so you’re unlikely to read a ton of books in any given month. For comparison, an unlimited monthly Netflix streaming subscription costs $8 a month. On the other hand, individual audio books can cost as much as a hardback book: For example, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography costs $35 on Audible.

If you listen to more than two audio books a month and are always connected to the Internet, an Audiobooks.com subscription is a good deal. However, keep in mind that the company is still expanding its library and doesn’t have a huge selection of books just yet (that means no Harry Potter).

Via Mashable

Rainbow books image via ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

When Apple announced its textbook initiative on Thursday, there was a rush of excitement among educators. Textbooks from major publishers, which can cost $40 to $75 dollars in print, would be available as interactive e-books for $15 or less. The new iBooks Author application could turn anyone into a publisher, with its simple interactive e-book creation tools.

But then there was the small print: In order to buy and read these textbooks, each student will have to own an Apple iPad. No computer, off-brand tablet, or even iPhone or iPod touch will work. Books made with the new iBooks Author application are only viewable on iPads in the iBooks 2 app, can only be sold through Apple’s iBookstore (where the company takes its customary 30 percent of the sales cost), and cannot be exported as ePubs, the standard open format for all e-book files.

For the schools that can afford iPads, Apple’s new apps and partnerships are brimming with potential.

“We looked at each other after the announcement, and said ‘Apple must have been reading our minds. This is exactly what we’ve been talking about,’” said Eric Spross, director of technology at the private Menlo School in Atherton, Calif.

Menlo School’s iPad pilot program has been in place for more than a year. All eighth and tenth graders are given an iPad for the school year, and though the school owns the tablets, the kids have full custody and can take them home.

“We felt that laptops and desktops focus students too much on the technology and not enough on the content or communication with another human,” said Spross. “We choose iPads because they’re lightweight, portable, have a long battery life, and are self-service. They’re easier to support.”

Apple’s education announcement was the missing piece in a puzzle for Menlo School. Even though it already had the iPad program, its devices hadn’t made the leap to being e-readers due to a dearth of e-textbooks. Apple’s new partnerships with publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson will fix that.

Teachers were streaming some iTunes U content, but not much since publishing was limited to university-level courses. Now iTunes U is open to high schools, and a new iTunes U iOS app makes the content accessible from anywhere. Interestingly, Spross said teachers were also eager for a way to create and share their own lessons and books, which they can do on iBooks Author (as soon as they upgrade to Lion).

Tuition for Menlo School is $34,900 year. The school purchased all the iPads at full price from its own technology budget.

Not every school is so fortunate.

“We don’t really have a technology budget,” said Maria De La Vega, superintendent of the Ravenswood public school district in East Palo Alto, Calif. (not far from Menlo School, and a mre 30 minute drive from Apple HQ). “Most of what we’ve been able to acquire has been through donations and leftovers from offices closing down.” HP donated a number of small laptops to the district, so there’s now one computer for every sixth to eighth grade student. But those devices will be unable to read the new digital textbooks or any content created with iBooks Author.

The iPad is currently the most expensive consumer tablet on the market, starting at $499. While Apple is bringing down the prices of iPad-only textbooks, the company does not offer any known discounts on its iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch hardware to educational institutions, even for bulk orders.

“I’ve heard of the Kindle and the Kindle Fire, and I understand that they’re not as expensive. But I don’t know if they’re compatible,” said De La Vega optimistically (they’re not). While she thinks e-textbooks are a great idea for saving money, she is realistic about the challenges of making the switch.

“We’d have a lot of questions about how they would work, like security and what grade level they’d be most successful with. We’d need to make sure our staff is well trained, to utilize and make the most out of the program,” De La Vega said.

The nearly 100,000 U.S. public schools face restraints beyond money. They are also bound by state and federal regulations that dictate what books they use and what they can spend money on. Unless the full, approved list of school textbooks are made available on the iPad, these schools wouldn’t be able to use textbooks based on the Apple tablets even if they could save money that way.

“Teachers in private schools can select their own textbooks. Public schools can’t. That’s a distinction that’s larger than having iPads or if they can afford the technology,” said Menlo School’s Spross. He pointed out that it’s not all bleak for public schools: “Some of the most compelling and innovative work has been in public schools, in very scientific, state-sponsored programs.”

The iPad restriction is odd for another reason: Tying a file to one piece of hardware (in this case, a textbook to an iPad) is a step backward for a company that knows the future lies with accessing your data from multiple devices. Toward that end, Apple was an early adopter of cloud storage for consumers. Steve Jobs unveiled the company’s iCloud service in June 2011, which enables you to store music, books, photos, contacts, calendars, and more in the cloud.

Cloud storage might make the difference for e-textbooks, too. Only when public schools can put $15 e-textbooks on donated laptops, inexpensive e-ink readers, smartphones, and whatever devices students may already own, can Apple’s textbook “reinvention” be taken seriously by public schools.

Additionally, Apple should update its iBook Author application export to the more universal ePub 3 format and rewrite the iBooks Author end user license agreement so that books made with the application can be sold anywhere. (Can you imagine if music made in Garage Band could only be sold in iTunes?)

Until then, there are other great projects successfully using technology to bring affordable and free education to kids who wouldn’t normally have access to it. The One Laptop Per Child organization unveiled its sub-$100 X0-3 tablet at CES this month. The Khan Academy has more than 2,700 free online video classes on everything from Michelangelo to microeconomics. In India, the government has created the $35 Aakash tablet which will be used to educate underprivileged kids. And Apple of course offers iTunes U, a huge collection of free lectures and courses from top universities.

At Menlo School, Spross is already busy figuring out how to best use the new Apple products, which were the missing piece in the school’s technology puzzle. “Without this last piece it was, ‘Wow, great gizmo with a lot of potential, but does it mean anything?’”

But for most public schools, the iPad will continue to be a missing piece.

Photo via Barrett.Discovery/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As it did with music and cellphones, Apple today fundamentally redefined what a textbook is with the announcement of iBooks 2 and its accompanying iBooks Author software.

The benefits of iBooks 2 and its interactive textbooks were hammered home during Apple’s New York City press event today: they’re interactive, easily updated, portable, the list goes on. But now that Apple’s hype machine has calmed down a bit, the issues with the company’s grand plan to revitalize education are becoming more apparent.

iPads for everyone?

First, there are the obvious problems. For Apple’s digital textbooks to actually take off, more students will need easy access to iPads. I, along with many others, expected Apple to announce some sort of plan to get more iPads in schools. But instead, today’s event ended abruptly as if Apple’s executives left the stage in mid-song.

At $500 a pop, an iPad isn’t a light buying decision for most college students. Though if Apple is successful at convincing schools to adopt its digital textbooks, schools will likely be able to offer the tablets at a discount for students.

In an ideal world, students would actually save money by purchasing an iPad and spending far less on books every semester (Apple’s current digital textbooks retail for $15 and under). For now though, an iPad will be another added expense on top of all the paper books students still need to buy.

For K-12 public schools, it would be the school systems that have to purchase the iPads for students. Again, they may get some major discounts from Apple, but I can’t imagine too many public schools that would be willing to give kids and teenagers an expensive gadget to take home.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Paul Edelman, founder and CEO of the open education marketplace Teachers Pay Teachers, calls the digital textbook’s reliance on the iPad “either a brilliant strategy on Apple’s part, or it will make its overall impact underwhelming.” Teachers have already earned over $4 million on Teachers Pay Teachers selling course guides and other materials to other educators, something that shows many teachers will likely take up Apple’s offer to create textbooks using iBooks Author and sell them on the iBookstore.

Edelman goes on to say, “iBooks Author, though very neat since it is available to everyone, my suffer the same fate since creators of content lock their users into one hardware device. Today teachers create content using many different applications that can then be used on any platform or device. I love Apple, but in education open is better than closed.”

The trouble with iBooks Author

In addition to being locked down to creating content for the iPad, there are also issues with Apple’s End User License Agreement (commonly called a EULA) for iBooks Author. In short, if you use the software to create an e-book, you can only sell the book on the iBookstore. Given that Apple is providing sophisticated e-book creation software for free, that doesn’t seem too unreasonable.

The real problem, though, is that Apple doesn’t even ask you to agree to the EULA, it’s assumed that you do if you use the software, as Dan Wineman points out. He writes:

So, to paraphrase: By using this software, you agree that anything you make with it is in part ours. But if it can say that and have legal force, can’t it say anything? Isn’t this the equivalent of a car dealer trying to bind you to additional terms by sticking a contract in the glove compartment? By driving this car, you agree to get all your oil changes from Honda of Cupertino?

Apple has quietly pushed desktop software into uncharted territory with iBooks Author. As Wineman points out, it’s as if Microsoft tried to enforce how you could use a Microsoft Word document. It’s the sort of thing open source software types have been worrying about for years, especially after Apple’s extremely restrictive stance on iOS app development.

A utopia easily becomes a dystopia

While I applaud Apple’s idealism when it comes to technology and education, realistically we’re going to need a lot more than an updated iBooks app and snazzy e-book editor to make a real difference in schools.

Technology-centric solutions also often fail to keep in mind the value of alternatives. There’s certainly something to be said for students engaging with material primarily because of an effective teacher. And when it comes to math problems, students will still need to be able to demonstrate on paper how they reached solutions, even if a calculator or iPad is helping them with the actual number crunching.

My biggest worry is that Apple’s vision takes off at the expense of other useful strategies for education. Given the cost of iPads, accessories, and maintenance, many schools could see their budgets blown away on Apple’s products, instead of other non-digital materials that could be just as helpful.

Photos by Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

I decided to take the iBooks Author app for a spin to see if the app follows Apple’s mantra of simplicity and usability, and I’m happy to report that it lives up to Apple’s typical high standards. One early report suggested Apple would launch a “Garageband for e-books,” and that phrase describes this app perfectly. Like Apple’s Garageband app makes the creation of digital songs intuitive, iBooks Author makes creating an e-book supremely simple.

When you open iBooks Author for the first time, you can choose from a template that helps you get going. Between choices like Botany, Astronomy and Art History, I chose the Astronomy template because it looked the most fun. After selecting it, the app showed a left hand column that navigates between parts of the book like the cover, introductory media, table of contents and the glossary. The setup reminded me a lot of navigating through Apple’s Keynote or Microsoft’s PowerPoint, but this is dedicated to books instead of presentations.

Unlike regular books, you can embed media into your e-books, such as movies, 3D models, photo galleries, interactive images and Keynote presentations. Also unlike regular books, you are given the ability to preview what your book looks like on the iPad before you publish. You can plug your iPad into your Mac or connect via a Wi-Fi network and click the Preview button on the top bar.

One major downside to this software is that only Lion OS users can use the iBooks Author app. All those Mac users with Snow Leopard or an earlier version of the Mac operating system are out of luck unless they update to Lion.

You can view a gallery of iBooks Author screenshots below. The first six are personal screenshots and last three are from Apple showing how pages look filled with media:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple set its sights on education this morning when it announced a slew of new apps and services for students and teachers.

Among them was iBooks 2, an updated version of the company’s iPad e-reading app that adds support for interactive textbooks. Apple promises that iBooks 2 is a complete reinvention of the textbook as we know it. From my hands-on time with the app this morning, I’m not sure Apple has completely obliterated the need for textbooks, but it’s certainly made some good first steps.

The free iBooks 2 app is available today, along with a few sample textbooks on the iBookstore. I chose the E.O. Wilson Foundation’s Life on Earth, being the science nerd that I am. The app took a few minutes to download and upon first launch it played a dramatic video featuring Wilson. The video, while a bit much, makes it feel like you’re exploring an episode of Planet Earth, instead of a dry science textbook.

As the video above shows, you’re presented with an attractive table of contents, which makes everything inside the book easily accessible. Navigating the e-book was incredibly fluid, and I loved finding new interactive elements on every page. Some pages featured videos, while others featured animations and interactive 3D models. The interactivity will certainly appeal to kids, but I can also see how it can help clarify concepts for high school and university students.

I have no doubt that Apple could build a truly next-gen textbook, but I still wonder about the logistics of reinventing textbooks. Students will need an iPad to use iBooks, and the company was conspicuously silent this morning on how it will help put iPads in the hands of more kids.

And so it did. Apple announced iBooks 2, an updated iPhone and iPad app that will offer highly interactive electronic textbooks, as well as a new textbook section in the iBookstore. The company also showed off a new version of iTunes U, which gives teachers the ability to do much more than create lectures for download.

Catch all of our coverage from the event below.
——-

Apple and education

“Education is deep in our DNA,” Apple marketing senior vice president Phil Schiller said as he introduced the event. “We’re so proud to help students learn. We try to bring the same passion and energy that we put into every product we make into our education business.”

Schiller is positioning the iPad as a “remarkable” tool for education, and goes on to mention the poor state of education in America. In a short video played at the event, teachers discuss some of the problems facing education, like large class sizes and a lack of materials like textbooks.

“These teachers need help. We try to figure out what we can do at Apple to help,” Schiller said. “One place we think we can help is in student engagement.  It’s not a big surprise that students get excited to learn on the iPad. It was #1 on teen’s wish lists this holiday.”

Schiller says there are over 20,000 education apps for the iPad currently, and that there are now 1.5 million iPads being used in education (I’d be interested to know how he got this number).

Reinventing textbooks with iBooks 2, iBooks Author

Now for the real meat of the event: Schiller says Apple has two methods in mind for helping education. First up, “reinventing the textbook.” He discussed how textbooks aren’t the best learning tools. For example, they’re not very portable, durable, searchable, interactive, and they can’t be kept up to date. But they do have great content.

Schiller unveiled iBooks 2, Apple’s attempt to fix the traditional textbook. An Apple representative showed off the new app at the event, demonstrating how a biology book can have a dramatic introduction movie, the benefits it gets from multitouch capabilities, and support for nifty interactive elements like 3D cell models.

If you want to just focus on the text of the book, you only need to rotate your iPad into the portrait orientation.

Other nifty interactive elements: There’s a built in glossary for explaining individual concepts, easily accessible index links, as well as visual interactive Q&A sections at the end of chapters. You can also easily highlight and take notes in the e-books, which appears to be greatly helped by multitouch.

iBooks 2 takes the notes a step further, allowing you to see all of your notes in a particular book in one spot. It also automatically turns your notes into study cards, along with glossary terms.

Apple is adding a new textbook section to the iBookstore to make the new e-books easy to find, and it will also offer free samples. The company recruited early partners to create digital high school textbooks, priced at $14.99 or less. Apple is currently working with  Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who make 90 percent of the textbooks available in the U.S. It has also partnered with DK Publishing and the E.O. Wilson foundation, the latter of which will be launching its next book, Life on Earth, exclusively on the iBookstore.

To create these glossy new e-books, Apple also announced iBooks Author, a new free app for Macs. It offers simple templates, as well as drag and drop designing for laying out the pages. Building on the company’s experience with the Keynote presentation app, iBooks Author also allows you to easily make your own unique experiences within the e-books without any programming knowledge.

The more technically inclined can also use HTML5 and Javascript programming in iBooks Author. There’s also a nifty preview function that will allow you to see your e-book in progress on your iPad.

Reinventing curriculum with new iTunes U

But Apple isn’t done yet. Eddy Cue, Apple’s SVP of Internet Software and Services, came on stage to discuss how the company is going to help teachers “reinvent the curriculum” with iTunes U, a service that lets students download lectures and other materials from iTunes. Cue says Apple has seen over 700 million downloads from iTunes U, and that it has mostly been used for lectures.

Cue introduced a new version of iTunes U that seems to let teachers do everything course-related on their iPad, like manage a syllabus, office hours, and post assignments. It seems cool, though I wonder how students who don’t have iOS devices will feel about this. Students can still download lectures using the app, but they can now stream them as well.

Over 100 courses have been created by participating colleges with iTunes U, Cue said. Even better, he says that Apple is opening the service up to K-12 schools now as well.

All of this is very exciting, but it’s strange that Apple made no mention of how students can more easily get a hold of iPads in the classroom. While cool, Apple’s plans to reinvent education could leave a lot of students out in the cold.

Via All Things D, The Verge’s live blogs; Front photo via Marcus Kwan

That’s according to Ars Technica, which points to sources that describe Apple’s plans for a “GarageBand for e-books” — in other words, software for interactive e-books that would be as easy to use as the company’s renowned music software.

Apple was very up-front that the event, which will be held at the Guggenheim Museum, will be centered on education. But up until now, all we’ve had to go on is a brief mention of Steve Jobs’ interest in the textbook market in Walter Isaacson’s biography.

With the proliferation of iPads in schools and classrooms, Apple has the perfect vehicle to deliver next-gen textbooks. Students could easily justify the cost of an iPad (which will last them for years) and digital textbooks, compared to spending several hundred dollars every semester on paper textbooks.

As VentureBeat’s Tom Cheredar previously explained, the education book publishing industrybrings in annual revenue upwards of $5.5 billion for sales of lower education (Kindergarten to 12th grade) and $3.7 billion for sales of scholarly/higher education in 2010, according to statistics from the Association of American Publishers. It makes perfect sense that Apple would want to enter into that $8 billion industry.

Despite the many advances in technology over the past decade, the textbook industry is still fairly traditional. College students still pay through the nose for huge books that they may never finish reading, and bookstores tend to mark up the already expensive books. There’s certainly room for some company to break the mold for textbooks — and what better company than Apple, which revolutionized the way we bought music?

Amazon launched a new line of Kindle products in November, which included the Kindle, the Kindle Touch and a seven-inch Kindle Fire tablet computer. Amazon is making little or no money on the devices, but it’s using them as a means to sell more products through its online retail store. The three products also topped Amazon’s bestseller list for the month and were among the most popular items sold in the UK, France, Spain and Italy as well as the main Amazon.com store.

The company also noted that its e-book sales rose significantly between Black Friday and Christmas Day — up 175 percent compared to the same period in 2010. Also, the first and fourth best-selling Kindle books released in 2011 were published independently by the books’ authors through Kindle Direct Publishing.

Third-party merchants on Amazon also experienced strong sales this holiday season. On average, the number of merchants who exceeded $5,000 during the holiday season was up 44 percent compared to last year.

Here are some other interesting details from Amazon’s 2011 holiday sales release:

• Amazon customers purchased enough copies of Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” book to create a stack taller than Mt. Everest.
• The cumulative weight of the Bowflex 552 Adjustable Dumbbells purchased by Amazon customers would outweigh more than 70 adult elephants.
• If you unfolded and stacked each pair of jeans purchased by Amazon customers this holiday, the height would be 2,500 times taller than the Statue of Liberty.
• Amazon customers purchased enough sweaters to outfit each of Santa’s reindeer during Christmas Eve deliveries for the next 14,000 years.
• Amazon customers purchased enough copies of Just Dance 3 to give 15 copies to each person who participated in setting the world record for simultaneous dancing.
• Amazon customers purchased enough HeatMax HotHands Handwarmers to give a pair to each resident of Iceland.
• Amazon customers purchased enough Rory’s Story Cubes to give a cube to each person watching the New Year’s Eve ball drop live at Times Square.