Jonathan Franzen, a man I have already described as "the greatest novelist the 1950's has to offer," has announced that e-books are damaging society:

“I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.

“Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball.

“But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

Sure, sure. You know it, Jonathan Franzen. The e-book is going to inspire the rise of fascist governments everywhere. And zippers are so easy to use that they inspire people to have immoral sex, so we should go back to button-fly pants, exclusively. And what's the deal with fire, anyway?

Franzen is always so worried about "serious readers." Serious readers were all he could talk about at Benaroya Hall when he came to town in 2010. I have yet to hear his definition of "serious readers," but I suspect when he pictures serious readers in his mind's eye, the serious readers he pictures look a whole lot like Jonathan Franzen.

Pew says that the number of Americans who own tablets and e-readers almost doubled over Christmas:

The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period.

The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January.

Between these enormous numbers and Apple's e-textbooks, I think this year could inspire a huge evolutionary step for e-books.

Slog tipper Levi sent along this very interesting post about Apple's new iBooks Author software, which is supposed to make e-book creation easy. Turns out, if you make a book in iBooks, you can only sell the iBook through Apple:

I have never seen a EULA as mind-bogglingly greedy and evil as Apple’s EULA for its new ebook authoring program.

Dan Wineman calls it “unprecedented audacity” on Apple’s part. For people like me, who write and sell books, access to multiple markets is essential. But that’s prohibited:

Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented.

Exactly: Imagine if Microsoft said you had to pay them 30% of your speaking fees if you used a PowerPoint deck in a speech.

There seems to be a real battle over this in the tech world: Apple apologists are saying that if you want to make an e-book to sell through Amazon.com and other outlets, you can still do that through non-iBooks Author means. But if you want to use Apple's easy-to-use. free software, you should be restricted to Apple's market. Basically: Apple doesn't own the words, just the software that created the book.

My daughter isn't unusual in that she has two homes, and apart from all the emotional baggage that comes with divorce, perhaps the most stressful part of the arrangement is the need to plan ahead for transport of her goddamn textbooks. These are big, clunky, heavy objects, that aren't needed every night for homework, but when they are, they're absolutely necessary. And they're expensive, at $75.00 or more a pop.

It seems almost stupid that in a world full of iPads and laptop computers, our children are still lugging around 25 pounds worth of textbooks each day, when their content could be just as easily—if not better—represented on an LCD screen. I've often joked with my daughter as we've lugged her books in and out of the car, that—just as she gawks at the notion that I got through all but the final year of my academic career with little more than a pencil and typewriter—her children would marvel at the technological backwardness of her youth as they browsed the entire Library of Congress on their iPad 30 or Kindle Fusion or whatever the future gadget is.

"You carried books around?" they'd question, aghast, like a drug-crazed Dr. McCoy wailing over the barbarism of 20th century surgeons.

Well, as Paul has already reported, according to Apple, that future is now, with today's introduction of iBooks 2 and their new e-book creation tool, iBooks Author. And best of all, as of today, some of the most commonly used high school textbooks are now available for download at a relatively reasonable price of $14.99 or less.

Yeah, I know, these aren't the first e-textbooks, and it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon ultimately dominates this particular e-book niche. But given Apple's track record at transforming content markets, and the steady downward pricing pressure on tablet computers, I would be surprised if e-textbooks don't become the dominant medium within a decade or so. The advantages to students, schools, and publishers should be obvious. (Well, maybe not to publishers, but if they can bring themselves to jettison their printing and distribution infrastructure and fully embrace a subscription model, things will work out well for them too.)

Continue reading »

This morning, Apple announced iBooks 2, a textbook platform for the iPad. According to Engadget, they've partnered with "Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt," which "are responsible for 90 percent of all textbooks sold," along with DK and the E.O. Wilson Foundation. The Verge has some hands-on video of these e-textbooks at work. Apple promises that these textbooks will cost $14.99 or less. They eat up a lot of storage—one of the seven books in the iBooks 2 store right now is 3 GB—which to me suggests that the upcoming iPad 3 is probably going to start at a higher base than 16 GB. In addition, Apple is blowing out iTunes U from its current role as a storehouse of lectures into what Engadget calls "full course materials," including integration with the e-textbooks.

And a free app called iBooks Author was announced today, too. It's a little less impressive than the "GarageBand for E-books" that people were anticipating—The Verge says "there's no WYSIWYG to build 3D objects from scratch or code HTML5 elements, you'll have to do that externally"—but the basic tools are there for anyone to create and publish a textbook-like e-book with Apple.

So, we have more affordable (after the initial $499 minimum outlay for an iPad) textbooks, an alliance with the major textbook publishers, a platform for distributing course materials, and a way to easily create and sell textbooks. What do you think?

Apple has announced they're hosting an education-minded press conference on Thursday, January 19th. Everyone assumes it has something to do with textbooks, which are something that Steve Jobs was reportedly obsessed with re-imagining in the years before his death. Ars Technica seems to have the scoop on what Apple will be announcing this week:

While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the "GarageBand for e-books," so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users...authoring standards-compliant e-books (despite some promises to the contrary) is not as simple as running a Word document of a manuscript through a filter. The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand.

If this program is easy enough for a layperson to use, this could be the thing that transforms e-books from simple reproductions of books into their own medium, replete with video, interaction, social networking, graphics, and text. I can imagine a number of uses for these kinds of e-books outside the standard academic context: Digital scrapbooking, for one, and new kinds of role-playing games. And because it's technology, I'm sure someone will manage to plug porn into it within the first five seconds of the product's release. This could be a big deal for publishing, or it might be something else entirely. (Or it could be the new Ping; it's important to remember that sometimes Apple screws the pooch, too.)

Gawker tells us of a new lawsuit filed against Amazon.com by a company that produces popular Kindle cases:

A federal lawsuit filed Thursday by M-Edge Accessories LLC accuses Amazon of all manner of bullying. According to M-Edge, it agreed in Nov. 2009 to pay Amazon a roughly 15 percent commission for the right to sell Kindle cases. That deal was supposed to last three years, but after two months, M-Edge says, Amazon demanded 32 percent and threatened to take M-Edge cases off its website if the company refused. M-Edge refused. About a year and a half later, Amazon demanded it agree to the onerous new terms, this time threatening to bury M-Edge in Amazon search results where "no one will be able to find you." With Amazon providing 90 percent of the company's revenue, it agreed, shelling out $6.5 million in additional fees.

After all that happened? According to the suit, Amazon just went ahead and basically ripped off the design for M-Edge's Kindle cases anyway, relegating the company's cases to a non-preferred place on their site, before making them unavailable on Amazon.com altogether. And M-Edge was paying for preferred placement! It's funny, because this story reminds me of something an independent bookstore tried to pull a couple of years back...oh, no, wait. No it doesn't. Because if this story is at all true, this is total fucking bullshit.