Yes I see people's need to defend Apple here but the bottom line is this product as designed is truly a waste of time. What people seem to keep missing is that it ONLY can produce textbooks for the iPad (iBooks 2 in textbook mode will not work on any other device). Why on earth would we want every student tied to using an iPad just to get access to textbooks?
Apple actually had a chance to create a GarageBand for ebooks and textbooks and blew it by deviating from the epub 3 spec, by refusing to even load or read epubs, by locking this down to just one device on just one platform. (And there is nothing inherently wrong about the epub3 spec - you should read it - it does not require any device to support scripting).
And yes I am a long-time Apple user (and have been since the first Mac SE was announced) and a long time Apple shareholder, and I guess this blatant attempt to "embrace and extend" the epub3 spec in an effort to lock in all students in education to iPads is a very very sad thing. Unfortunately, Apple has now become in my mind the same as Microsoft who has used this "embrace and extend" approach many times before. I kind of hoped Apple was a better "netizen" than that. I was wrong.
KevinH
Quote:
Originally Posted by mknopp
Not that I am too much on defending Apple and their lack of support for the ePub format that they claim to support. It has been atrocious.
But in this case, I am not sure that I agree with your complaint. From the sounds of it you read in some news article a prediction that some reporter made with no verification from Apple about what a product that hadn't been released yet was going to be. Then when Apple failed to live up to some journalist hype you blame Apple?
In this instance, I have to agree with fjtorres. Apple is being very much up front about exactly what this program is outputting and where it is usable. They never claimed that this was anything other than an editor to produce their proprietary format for textbooks to be read in iBooks only. They never claimed that this was any sort of ePub creator or editor.
Honestly, given what I have read about ePub3 and seeing what Apple is doing with their iBooks format, I am glad that they didn't attempt to make them ePub3 format. Because, I am pretty sure that they would have failed to make them compliant. Heck, given the article by Strahinja Marković about the epub3 format and the specific points concerning javascript, I am not sure that there really will be anything resembling a "standard" epub 3 document that will work everywhere. At least Apple is honest enough to let the user know that they aren't going to attempt it.
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