01-21-2012, 06:50 PM | #61 | |
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What's to say against PDF? It displays properly across a large range of different platforms. Therefore it is no surprise that there is a huge supply of non-fiction books in PDF available (both legal and illegal). |
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01-21-2012, 11:33 PM | #62 | ||
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01-22-2012, 01:45 AM | #63 | |
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This scheme means that, for authors that choose Apple's authoring software, there's no choice in format, very little choice in device, and no choice in where to get the books from. At least Amazon doesn't force users to use only Kindles. Apple's trying to get a lock-in on a sinister, almost handlebar-mustache scale of evil. It's one thing to say, "Our software only publishes to our devices" (even though that's an amount of lock-in that I'm not entirely comfortable with). It's quite another to say, "If you use our software, any content you create is partially ours, and you can't sell it anywhere else." That's just ludicrous. |
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01-22-2012, 01:56 AM | #64 | |
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Here I found something:
http://9to5mac.com/2012/01/19/ibooks...s-controversy/ Quote:
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01-22-2012, 10:50 AM | #65 | ||
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You can use iBooks Author to make books and give them away, no problem. You can use iBooks Author to make books and export the results as a PDF (albeit without all the bells and whistles interactivity, apparently) no problem. At the risk of labouring the point, this free software is not called eBook Author, or TextBook Author, or ePub Author; it's called iBooks Author. If you want to make a multi-media-rich ebook for sale outside of the iBooks Store, then this isn't the free software for you - you need to be using something else. Last edited by petermillard; 01-22-2012 at 12:14 PM. Reason: Spelling |
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01-22-2012, 11:26 AM | #66 | |
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01-22-2012, 02:47 PM | #67 | ||||
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And I thought it was a rhetorical question.
But apparently some people would rather deprive schoolkids of textbooks than allow them to have textbooks on a platform they dislike. Wonderful. Quote:
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Second - "evil?" Seriously "evil?" I don't think you know what the word means. Quote:
Sorry, that just doesn't meet the test of evil. If authors don't want to use the product, they're free not to. Just as they would be free to not use a product that cost too much. (And it's not evil to charge for software, either). It's not like you are required to use this program to write an iBook...and it's not even like iBooks are a significant part of the market. But I don't think that the conditions are particularly evil. (I may be wrong, but I also don't think that the program will be very successful...while I think that e-textbooks will (eventually) be the future, I don't think that the interactive part of the textbooks is much more than a gimmick. (It's a little more than a gimmick, but not a lot more.) It's cool that you can see a DNA strand rotate...but when it comes down to what HS kids learn about DNA in biology, the rotation won't cause them to actually learn any more than they would from a color picture. Also, mac only is too limiting. |
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01-23-2012, 01:25 AM | #68 |
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A lot of people are rightfully concerned that Apple is trying to lock schools into their own platform by enticing them with very appealing goodies. The strategy is simple: once you are vested in a platform it becomes very expensive and very difficult to move to another vendor. Better yet, if publishers have everything vested in a platform, other competing platforms will be locked out of the market. Incidentally, this criticism isn't targeted solely at Apple. A lot of vendors pursue it (Amazon, IBM, Microsoft all come to mind). It is probably safe to say that developing a platform and opening it up to the competition is an exception these days (Adobe's PDF/PS, Phillips' CD, Sun's Java come to mind).
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01-23-2012, 02:57 AM | #69 |
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I pontificated about this at length, elsewhere: Apple is not going to do what it would take to make etextbooks really useful, and will fall into the same traps that all the other attempts did.
They won't make them accessible to students with disabilities, which will make them ineligible for required public school use. They won't add the software features that are needed to make e-textbooks actually *better* than physical ones, rather than a trade-off of weight-vs-usability. And they won't be getting content from the current publishers who are fighting hard to hold onto their dwindling hardcover market. So they'll have a swarm of self-published and tiny-indie-press textbooks, some of which will be awesome--but you won't have any way of knowing which those are, because they can only be sold for the iPad, so only iBooks buyers will review them. And they'll only sell to people who can afford a $500+ piece of delicate hardware in their school supplies. This is not an attempt to improve the academic world & bring it into the digital era; it's an attempt to get lucrative hardware contracts with schools that aren't aware what they're buying and what it won't do. |
01-23-2012, 10:00 AM | #70 | |
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ETA: S/b "tied to individual accounts" Last edited by anamardoll; 01-23-2012 at 12:45 PM. |
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01-23-2012, 10:47 AM | #71 | |
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You're just trying to hold back The Future. |
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01-23-2012, 10:57 AM | #72 | |
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I'd like to see a source for the latter claim. |
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01-23-2012, 11:02 AM | #73 |
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DRM ties the book to the iTunes account, not to a device.
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01-23-2012, 11:27 AM | #74 |
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01-23-2012, 11:34 AM | #75 |
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Why do you believe that? The "Fairplay" DRM system that iBooks uses ties a book to an iTunes account, not to a specific iPad. I'd be very surprised if Apple changed their DRM system after so many years.
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