I think the only big new points designing books for the iPad would be as follows:
* Now you can use movies
* Color pictures
* Layout is much more flexible (room to play!)
* Your font colors will almost certainly be changed. I can't imagine reading black text on white background for hours - I always switch to Stanza where my default is grey on black.
In specific answer to your questions:
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1)is there an epub reader for PC which lets you test 1024x768? Do you think ibooks will have an emulator for the PC?
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You can set Adobe Digital Editions to be this size. There is an emulator for the iPad. It won't run on the pc, and I'm not sure how well it work work as an ePub tester. Seems convoluted.
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2)will people tend to use the default reading application ibooks or will they download several (Stanza, Delicious Library, etc).
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Depends on the configurations possible in iBook. It looked to me like there was no color configuration settings in iBook; and if so I will definitely be using Stanza.
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3)even though the resolution is allegedly 1024x768, I've been told that this is actually not particularly high for that screen size. Will this affect the choice of embedded fonts or font size?
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No more than it would on the Que or the MacBook. It's not bad for a 10" screen, most people are just complaining that it isn't widescreen. It's also not as awesome as some of the recent mobile devices released, but compared to regular computer LCDs it's a
fairly typical ppi.
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4)will the guidelines for graphics change?
http://www.zorba.us/?page_id=676
I foresee problems when trying to produce ebooks for both the Kindle 2 and the ipad. I guess the lesson learned here is that 63K will still be the upper maximum, with images scaled up or down and using css to declare a maximum width in percentage for the img element.
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Yes, I'm sure they will. Eventually. I wouldn't rock any boats for a while though.
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5)I wonder if anybody has any thought about whether people will do a significant amount of reading in landscape mode.
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An interesting question, but not something a creator of ePubs should be too worried about. Landscape mode will probably (hopefully) involve two columns in future versions of the software. Since ePub is reflowable, other than to take care of your images, who cares?
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6)I also have to wonder whether this sort of reading device will again bring books for the Safari browser (via subscriptions or through hybrid solutions such as Ibis http://blog.threepress.org/2009/11/0...nd-bookserver/ or Bookworm). Then again, I have to wonder about multimedia support for Safari (since flash doesn't appear to be in the picture).
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It seems likely, though the lack of plugins will be a huge problem. Flash will not be supported at release.
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7)Again, the different real estate specs might make some features practical which were only possible-but-awkward in the smaller eink device. Any thoughts about that?
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Very yes! I can imagine people attempting to use a lot more fancy layouts. Should be interesting to see how they render.
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8)I have to wonder what will the impact be on reading blogs and RSS feeds. Will this device increase the proportion of reading that is done on bookish things or bloggy things? (i.e., will rss reader and ebook reader be 2 distinct apps, or will ibooks try to bring both kinds of reading together).
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I've wondered about this too. I'd really like to see some mind-melding of ePub and RSS. Maybe just a "See the RSS feed for this topic here (link)".
Well I can tell you what happens now on the iPhone: if the link is within doc, you go to that section of the doc. Otherwise, depending on the application rendering your text, you are either asked what to do (open in a browser? read within this app in a new pane?) or taken automatically to the browser. It is possible to put links in regular websites which also take you back to the app you came from after whatever you read in the link - the Kindle app does a good job of this now. This is really a pretty seamless experience so long as there is a url to take you back to the app.
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10)some have speculated about annotations software. Will the ibook be doing that? Can a developer do a plugin that adds that functionality to ibook?
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No idea what plugin functionality will be available, but since there are no plugins for any other app on the iPhone, I would suspect not. That doesn't mean annotation will be impossible though - the B&N app, Kindle app, and Stanza all support annotation. If Apple leaves it out of theirs, it would be pretty lame.