CNN’s breathless story about how the iPad is doing better on the secondary market (resale) than Amazon’s Kindle makes me wonder if no on there considered the obvious reasons:
Hence, little or no resale value.
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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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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Apple is providing a multimedia ebook of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine for free. The book has audio, limited animation, and video clip components to it. It is categorized as a children’s book. But, any Beatles fan will probably get a kick out of it.
Navigation through the pages feels a lot jerkier than other iBook ebooks on my iPad 2. I do not see this kind of page turning hesitation when reading conventional iBook ebooks.
I decided to try out the free Mobipocket eBook reader on my HTC Advantage 7500 since that Windows Mobile Pocket PC (Professional Edition) has a big display and good battery life. I also downloaded a free ebook from Feedbooks.
Although the screencap above is in landscape mode, I ended up switching to portrait mode to actually read the book. I don’t recommend doing this (switching from landscape to portrait using Mobipocket’s internal screen control) though because it leaves the Advantage in this mode after exiting the reader and leaves it in a state where you cannot access parts of the screen. I had to soft reset the Advantage to get access to the screen. And, even then I had to manually change the screen orientation. A second attempt left a status bar at the bottom of my landscape oriented screen that would not go away until I soft reset the box again. So, I removed it and will not be trying it again.
The reading experience on a Pocket PC has never been a good one. I remember trying Microsoft Reader back when it used to come installed on Palm-size PCs. That was not a good experience either (though it did not mess with my display the way Mobipocket does). I’ll wait to see if an ebook reader appears for the iPhone/iPod touch (I have a touch). I suspect the ebook reading experience will be pretty good on that platform.