MobileViews Blog

Category: iPad

  • Will iBooks textbooks need ads to support expensive multimedia book development?

    Apple’s multimedia iBooks textbooks fascinates me in terms of its development (Apple iBooks Author for Mac OS X) and the books themselves. One thing is clear, developing these multimedia textbooks is going to be an expensive proposition. Textbooks tend to be much more complicated publications that, for example, novels because of the the number of page components. Novels tend to be a stream of text in, for the most part, a single typeface and font size. Textbooks have sidebars, indexes, charts, photos, maps, and even objects requiring different ink colors. Adding audio, video, and interactive learning tools ups the ante for textbook development even more.

    The E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth project estimates that the production and maintenance (updates) will cost millions of dollars: Initial development of Life on Earth will cost $8.5 million. Continuing costs will be approximately $1.5 million per year, including continuing development, maintenance, and bandwidth expenses. In all, we will require continuing annual support equivalent to the budget of a very small municipal museum, yet we expect to deliver value on another scale altogether
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  • Students will need 64GB iPads to store multiple rich media iBooks

    Apple’s updated iBooks 2 app supports highly interactive multimedia textbooks created by the new free iBooks Author software for Mac OS X. iBooks Author’s EULA lock-in clause has raised a ruckus (see: Publish an ebook created using iBook Author & lock yourself in Apple-land forever). However, there’s another problem that may be a showstopper for students and other people who want to use these multimedia iBook ebooks: Their iPad may not have enough storage space to house the ebook.
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  • Sencha demos CSS3 animation support in iBooks created using iBooks Author

    Can you include CSS3 animation in iBooks created using Apple’s new iBooks Author app? That’s what the people at Sencha wondered about too. So, they created a CSS3 animation using Sencha Animator and included it in a test iBook created with iBooks Author. You can see the result above.

    How to Embed Interactive CSS3 Animations in an iBook

    You can listen to my discussion with Sencha’s Senior Director of Product Management, Aditya Bansod. in MobileViews Podcast 54 recorded last month.

  • Apps updated for my iPhone & iPad in the past week: 30


    Thirty (30) of the apps for my iPad &/or iPhone were updated in the past week. Apps that do not have comments in the list below indicates that the update is simply a bug fix release.
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  • New Apple Podcast: Meet the Developer – audio + photo slideshow

    It looks like Apple launched a new podcast series named Meet the Developer. It is under the TV & Film/Events at the Apple Store category. The first podcast features a fourth generation butcher who released an app named Pat LaFrieda’s Big App for Meat ($6.99). The app has a somewhat unusual format. It combines the audio track with a slideshow of still photos from the discussion.

  • Publish an ebook created using iBook Author & lock yourself in Apple-land forever

    Apple created the desktop publishing industry in the 1980s. In the 21st century, they want to reinvent ebook publishing. Part of this reinvention process is the free iBooks Author software for Mac OS X that Apple released today (2012.01.19). Anyone using a Mac can download it from the Mac App Store at no charge, use the software to create an ebook, and publish it through Apple’s iBookstore. You can bypass the iBookstore publishing process for testing and informal distribution by simply getting the file over to an iOS device using, for example, Dropbox.

    However, as most of us have learned by now, there’s always a price to pay even when something is free. In this case, the price is being locked into distributing only through Apple’s iBookstore if you create an ebook using iBooks Author that is sold for a fee. From that point on, any ebook created using iBooks Author must be distributed through the iBookstore. That’s what Dan Wineman learned by reading the software’s EULA: If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.