eBooks

Apple’s iBooks Author

Wednesday, 08 February 2012 14:38 Written by Mark Seabrook

iBooks Author was launched at an Apple press event at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. This new Mac OS X application can be used to create any kind of book, but Apple has focused in heavily on textbooks and has already partnered with academic publishers McGraw-Hill and Pearson, who have content ready in this new format. Books created with iBooks Author can be viewed in the iBooks 2 application.

So what exactly is iBooks Author and what can it do? Its features are designed to help bring highly illustrated and complex layout books to life in a digital format. Anyone who has used Apple’s excellent presentation software Keynote or products such as Adobe InDesign will feel comfortable with the user interface of iBooks Author. Some of the key features include:

Ø A selection of page layout templates to help get you started, or you can design your own

Ø Add text, shapes, charts, tables, and Multi-Touch widgets anywhere on the page with a single click

Ø Mask images, use alignment guides — even add reflections and shadows

Ø Add a variety of widgets such as: interactive images, interactive galleries of images, 3D images, video & audio, questions/reviews (multiple choice, chose correct image, label the image, or a mixture)

Ø Widgets can also be custom written for an iBook using code in Javascript and HTML

Ø iBooks Author also simplifies creating glossaries for a title. Simply highlight a word and click a button, and the word is added to a glossary, while definitions for words can also be simply added

Ø Accessibility: The table of contents, glossary, widgets, main text, and more are built to automatically take advantage of VoiceOver technology

The big players – Expanding their offering and reach

Thursday, 27 October 2011 09:10 Written by Mark Seabrook

Amazon, Kobo and Google have all been very busy in the last month expanding their device offering and their geographical reach, hoping to put their device in your hands this festive season and secure your future e-book purchases.

Amazon kicked things off on 28 September, launching their much speculated tablet device, the Kindle Fire, which will ship on 15 November and sell for $199. During the same press event Amazon announced a touch-screen version of the Kindle selling for $99, a non-touch-screen Kindle selling for $79 and a new mobile web browser called Amazon Silk. ‘We’re making premium products and offering them at non-premium prices’, says Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO).

THE KINDLE FIRE

A week later, on 6 October, Google announced the launch of their Google e-books UK store, which will include e-books from Hachette, Random House and Penguin and over two million public domain e-books. The Google e-books are stored in the cloud and will work across a range of devices.

Are libraries dying? Unlikely so!

Wednesday, 26 October 2011 13:10 Written by Julia Lhuillery-Moulder

With the rise of e-books one may think that libraries have problems keeping up. It seems that, on the contrary, US libraries are becoming again a popular place to visit.

OverDrive – the leading e-book and digital audiobook distributor to libraries – stated that e-book checkouts increased by more than 200% in 2010. Furthermore this trend is accelerating as the checkouts nearly tripled in September 2011 reaching 12 million so far this year.

According to a recent study from the American Library Association, more than 2/3 of public libraries in the US offer e-book checkouts. OverDrive distributes to over 15 000 public and school libraries in the country. To ensure that e-books supplied by libraries are compatible to a majority of e-readers and mobile devices, OverDrive has partnered with high profile companies such as Sony, Amazon and Barnes and Noble which allow library lending.

Libraries are more appealing than ever. People can just visit their local library’s website from their home or mobile phone, and download the e-books of their choice. Mobile and tablet users represent 21% of the checkouts according to OverDrive.

US school libraries are also embracing modern times. 44% of school libraries now offer e-book lending to students and the number is on the rise since only 1/3 of schools were providing this service last year. E-books appeal more to the higher echelons of education - 71% of high school libraries, 55% of middle schools and 35% of elementary schools offer e-book checkouts.

Few South African libraries currently offer e-books but looking at the trend overseas this situation is likely to improve. The stumbling blocks for libraries may be the cost of integration with e-book distributors like OverDrive and the small penetration of e-book devices in South Africa.

Will Digital Dominate Publishing by 2020?

Monday, 24 October 2011 13:29 Written by Lara Aucamp

According to the early findings from The Digital Census 2011, The Bookseller’s annual survey of digital trends and opinions, more than half of people working in the industry think that by 2020, sales of eBooks will overtake those of their printed counterparts.