Thursday, February 25, 2010

News

The eBook Format: Creating Content for the Smart Phone
On the iPhone, I use Amazon's Kindle App and the Stanza reader, which I downloaded when the App Store first appeared here. As the iPhone supports the .epub format, I examined some software that would help me make my own examples. If, as an ordinary user, I can do it, then others can, at little cost, highlighting content and not packaging.


None of the software I have will convert files to this e-book format: Apple should add this to Pages and Text Edit. Instead I looked at Open Source software, focusing on three applications: Sigil, Stanza Desktop and Calibre.
Source: eXtensions


B&N: Nook “Single Best-Selling Product”; CEO Rebuffs iPad Fears
Riggio said sales of Nook, which it described as “strong,” helped boost online sales for the company by 67% in the January ending fiscal Q3. Had the company had more units in stock, that 67% increase would have been higher, argued Riggio.

However, the Nook helped to drag down gross profit by 1 percentage point in the quarter.
Source: Barron's


Apple plans to expand iPhone OS to more platforms
Apple is planning to leverage its work in transforming Mac OS X to work on other devices
[Like that's a surprise -Ed]
Source: Arstechnica


Tools of Change Round-up Day 2
The second day of the Tools of Change conference left me with a notebook and a brain overflowing with ideas, information, and inspiration. It’s almost too much to digest in one day. I feel like a ZIP archive—compressed. And to top it off I went to the New York InDesign User Group meeting and watched Bob Levine and Gabriel Powell present on exporting from InDesign to Dreamweaver and EPUB, respectively. Good times.
Source: InDesignSecrets.com


iPad in Japan: The Ultimate Manga Distribution Platform?
Following on from my recent article iPad as iPad I thought I’d look again at the Japanese market. Since I published that article Apple have taken it upon themselves to become a lot more prudish in the way they maintain the app store and while I agree that heavy handed involvement in the app store has been a necessary part of the success of the iPhone, I wonder how this very American approach to freedom of speech will affect the iPad’s performance in Japan.
Source: Of Rice and Zen


iBooks or Apps? The publishers dilemma
Many publishers have started using the iPhone App Store as a channel to sell book content by packaging e-books as applications. There are currently 18,000 books in the App Store, and books are the fastest growing category of applications in the store.

With the launch of the iPad and the iBookstore Apple have given publishers another option for delivering content. In this post we analyse the pros and cons of both approaches.

Source: The Discovery Blog


Is the price right for e-books?
...after canvassing the views of people who have plunged into the age of electronic reading I've concluded, after an admittedly unscientific poll, that they're buying precious few e-books.
[...]
Now the book trade is going through another upheaval as it tries to work out what readers will pay for e-books. What seems clear at the moment is that prices are too high to persuade more than a dedicated few that digital reading is the way forward.
Source: BBC.co.uk dot.Rory



Three iPad Questions
Does the iPad have MS Exchange support?
Can I put my own EPUB documents on it?
Does book formatting matter to you?
Source: iPhone Nano



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