There's an interesting set of demo videos here:
http://www.apple.com/education/ibook...s/gallery.html
I don't know how the economics stack up, but it looks like the sell for school authorities is that it will be cheaper to buy students iPads and ebooks rather than print textbooks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wannabee
If I count as anyone, then you're mistaken. ePubs are very forgiving in iBooks and look good without trying. Apple has provided a reader that I occasionally have to laugh at myself because I lick my fingers before trying to turn the page.
Apple have ALWAYS worked outside the perameters everyone else did. Why would you think they would change now.
For my part, I obviously like the way apple do stuff. If you don't like iBooks, don't use it. However, I do think that this new Apple program AUTHOR will make inroads into the world of POPULAR fancy, bells and whistle eBooks which today's population of non readers will grab for if even just out of curiosity.
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I'm a big Apple fan. iBooks is very nice and if I had an iPad I would use it more. However, I prefer to buy eBooks that I can read on a number of devices.
My impression, which may be unfair, is that ebooks are relatively low on Apple's list of priorities well behind things like magazines. That isn't surprising - it's obviously not going to be as focussed on books as Amazon - and of course the iPad is made for reading things like magazines. The absence of a reader for iBooks on OSX is another example of how Apple seems to have other priorities (that's not intended as a criticism - simply an observation).
There's an interesting set of posts on TUAW.com on the things Apple needs to do to make things easier for authors and publishers wanting to put books into iBooks - maybe the new authoring tool has addressed these issues. I don't know.
iBooks Author does seem to have had a very good reception. But it is limited by the EULA to producing for books for sale through the iBookstore (at least if you want to sell books you create). From one perspective that's perfectly understandable (after all Amazons content creation tools only produce content for Amazon readers) but on the other hand it would seem to rule it out as a content production tool for publishers who also want to sell through other outlets. Maybe they would have been better-off producing it as a paid-for application without the restrictions. Again I don't know, and i'm well aware most of the people who second-guess Apple end up with egg on their faces.