News tagged ‘publisher’

According to MacNN, yesterday The Ministry of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages announced that it had granted formal approval of the iBookstore. Its Minister James Moore positively commented this decision:

"Our Government is committed to strengthening Canada's economy through all its sectors, especially arts and culture. Apple has demonstrated how iBookstore Canada represents new opportunities for Canadian authors and publishers, and I have determined that this investment will be of net benefit to Canada."

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According to the Wall Street Journal, yesterday the Japan Book Publishers Association, the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan, the Japan Magazine Publishers Association and Digital Comic Association issued a joint press release, where Apple's content is called as infringing and "illegal". Particularly, the works well-known Japanese authors Keigo Higashimo and Haruki Murakami were mentioned as illegally scanned and distributed via the App Store.

“The associations we represent believe that Apple bears grave responsibility for this problem".

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Today Peter Kafka, who is a journalist writing for MediaMemo blog, reported that publishers and Apple cannot still come to an agreement on subscriptions for iPad content in the App Store.  The reason is still the same - publishers want to provide personal data about subscribers to advertisers, while Apple doesn't want to do this.

However, Apple proposes an alternative to the publishers, notably an opt-in form which will allows subscribers to choose whether publications can get an access to a "limited amount of information", which includes user's name, e-mail and physical mailing address, or not.

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A new ad from Amazon pokes fun at the outdoor viewing capabilities of devices like the iPad while highlighting the low price of the third-generation Kindle.

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Apple has posted a new job listing looking for a marketing manager specifically for the iBookstore. The listing seeks an experienced business marketer "to drive awareness and sales of iBooks through co-marketing programs with publishers and authors, strategic partnerships, and via online and direct marketing tactics." It seems like a lot of the position will be self-driven, as whoever's chosen will be asked to come up with some interesting schemes to push iBook sales, both with publishers, and even across the other divisions of iTunes. But the bottom line is of course sales -- Apple wants someone to push iBooks, specifically in the US.

This Tuesday Adobe revealed its new digital viewer technology for creating e-magazines that can be viewable on touchscreen devices like Apple's iPad.

The technology was first demonstrated when the iPad version of Wired magazine was introduced. We wrote that Adobe had to rewrite the software in Objective-C for Apple to approve it. Since the release iPad Wired edition stays near the top of the App Store sales chart with its price $4,99.

Here's what the vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe David Burkett said about new technology:

"We aim to make our digital viewer software available to all publishers soon and plan to deliver versions that work across multiple hardware platforms. It's safe to say that if you are already working in InDesign CS5, you'll be well on your way to producing a beautiful digital version of your publication."

Judging by the Wired iPad edition, new digital viewer technology can offer integrating videos, 360-degree rotatable images, slide shows and more directly into the magazine.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUEF2Klofzs

Yesterday Wired magazine had finally released its iPad edition.  Chief editor Chris Anderson told that the magazine now uses new publishing technology created by Adobe that allows using the same tools for creating both digital and print versions of the edition.  He also admires the version created for iPad:

"It has all of the visual impact of paper, enhanced by interactive elements like video and animated graphics. We can offer you a history of Mars landings that lets you explore the red planet yourself. We can take you inside Trent Reznor's recording studio and let you listen to snippets of his work in progress. And we can show you exactly how Pixar rafted each frame of its new movie, Toy Story 3."

To create a digital version compatible with iPad (which doesn't support Flash), Adobe had to recreate it in Objective-C, The Wall Street Journal explains. Rebuilt edition has all the features of the initial version. Though the edition looks great, there are still many other features, such as search functions and social connectivity, to be added in the future issues.

Wired publisher Conde Nast also owns other magazines, but the company noted it will not create special iPad edition for them.

iPad version of Wired is available here for $4.99. It is a June issue; next issues will be available as a part of library included in application. The subscription will become allegedly available this autumn.

Apple’s iBookstore is beginning to open internationally. It is accessible only on iPads via iBookstore app. Some day the service will be extended to iPhones and iPods.

Several international sites report that Apple's iBookstore is avaliable in several new countries. For the time being, international iBookstore offerings appear limited to free Project Gutenberg titles. Apple is doing its best to sign-up publishers in other markets, while local regulatory and business concerns are slowing the effort in some countries (like the UK).

Last week Alexander Vaughn from the AppAdvice.com resource had a chance to take a first look at the iBookStore. As you see from the screenshot above, late rumors about higher e-book prices for iPad are confirmed to be false. Moreover, 27 of the 32 books presented in the NYT's Bestseller section cost $9,99 which is exactly the same price as for Amazon Kindle versions.

To expand their market share Amazon chose a strategy of selling the most popular and newly released books at a loss. Now it seems that such a serious concession won't take a proper effect.

iBookStore is a platform for selling iPad e-Books. The working scheme is the same as for iPhone developers - publishers are free to set the prices they want, but Apple keeps 30% of it.

Here is an interesting video from CNN about iPad, Kindle and publishers:

Here's a link to youtube.

Penguin, one of the biggest publishers, gave a very interesting presentation in London. Penguin CEO John Makinson spoke about eBooks, iPad Books and Apps.

Penguin is not using the ePub format for books, rather building the applications in html according to Makinson:

"We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about".

"So for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs".

"We don’t know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error."

Makinson sees ebooks hitting 10% of book sales next year (up from 4%). Take a look at the video:

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Yesterday the Associated Press announced plans to create a new unit named "AP Gateway". It will focus on creating an application for mobile platforms and particularly for iPad tablet device.

It is likely that their app will require a paid subscription, but at first it may appear as free, according to AP senior vice president Jane Seagrave.

AP Gateway will work with local news affiliates to create package of their own content.

Other publishers are still expressing concern over the profit that will be shared with Apple and the latter's unwillingness to report information about subscribers (which is important for marketing and tailoring publisher's content).

Steve Jobs’s attempts to convince publishers to provide the content in a useful digital form were not that successful and the negotiations initiated in February have "stumbled."

Some newsmakers report of "friendly" talks, but speak of Apple's business model as a crucial change for the publishing business. They aware of the impact iTunes had had on the songs industry in 2003. Then the number of downloads of single songs from Apple influenced the resulting purchases of the singers’ albums.

Apple has been conquering the e-reader market long before the new iPad was on offer. So that is not a surprise that such companies as Amazon, which previously dominated the market have to increase their prices in response to the iPad’s outbreak.

Silicon Alley Insider reported recently that Steve Jobs visited New York City to meet with executives at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for discussions about bringing their content to the iPad.

Apple CEO held a dinner meeting with 50 representatives of The New York Times, though the visit to The Wall Street Journal was more low-key and the audience was very limited.

On Friday morning Steve Jobs also visited Time & Life Building to demonstrate an iPad to Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore and roomful of magazine editors.

It is obvious, that the goal of Jobs’ NYC visit is a content partnership. Since the iPad presentation, Apple has been working hard to broaden its content deals by pursuing book publishers and bringing textbook publishers on board. Currently the company apparently starts to focus its efforts on the magazine and newspaper industries.

During the Apple iPad presentation we all saw that the link with a flash content was broken. So it became pretty obvious that Steve Jobs' company continues to impose a list of restrictions on their devices that limit both consumers and content publishers. Without Adobe Flash support all of the iPad users won't be able to access the full range of web content, and that includes over 75% of video and 70% of games.

Though Adobe and about 50 of their partners in the Open Screen Project are aiming to bring Flash to all sorts of other devices. And if Palm Pre and Nokia N900 runs Flash extremely well, there is no reason iPad can't do it on its new 1 Ghz dual-core chip.