Amazon’s Kindle format 8 (KF8) relies on a completely separate process to create a fixed layout e-book than Apple’s version of fixed layout for titles that are design-led e-books. Both are based on XHTML, but there are important differences in how pages are laid out. With KF8, each page has to be specified as either portrait or landscape by the creator of the book, and one double page spread that you view in a fixed layout e-book on the Kindle Fire is one XHTML file. In iBooks fixed layout e-books, each of the two pages in a double page spread is a separate XHTML file, and individual pages can be rendered in both orientations. There are also various other notable technical limitations in the current version of KF8 for the Fire. You cannot currently play audio or video with KF8 e-books on the Kindle Fire, although you can do this on Kindle e-books within Kindle apps on the iPad and there is no support for read-along e-books. Finally, there is no pinch and zoom on a page. Instead, KF8 has a feature called ‘region magnification’ which allows the text to pop up when tapped to aid reading. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach, but the feature is a further move away from a single standard.

Kobo follows similar specs to Apple, but doesn’t support embedded video. Barnes & Noble has developed its own separate tools for creating graphical content for Nooks so the actual format is “a bit of an enigma.”

These different formats pose a problem for publishers who want to create graphical and multimedia works such as picture books or children’s books—they could end up having to create the same book three or four different ways for three or four different platforms. That’s a lot of extra work.

I would add that even ordinary text e-books for which formats have been more or less standardized have their balkanization problems. The different DRM used by each provider, for one thing, and Amazon’s Mobi versus Apple’s and B&N’s EPUB formats for another. And the vested interest these e-book stores have in locking customers into their store only isn’t helping.

If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple. This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format.

Couldn’t be much plainer than that. Apple is only claiming rights over books released in its own format, that only iBooks 2.0 can even read. If you’re going to use iBooks Author to crank out an EPUB to slap on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, you’re safe.

Did Apple intend this all along and just slip up on writing the EULA, or did Apple change its mind after an outcry? It seems pretty obvious to me that Apple only has an interest in books in its own proprietary format, but whether you agree will probably depend on how much of an Apple conspiracy theorist you are. Either way, it’s good that Apple has clarified the matter so we can stop worrying about the tempest in our teacups, and just drink our tea.

One of the things that digital content makes obvious is that the current physical manifestation of a print-bound textbook is a strangely awful construct — one designed to remove students one step (at least one step) from the primary sources that inform the field they’re studying. You don’t read Darwin; you read "Introduction to Biology." You don’t read de Tocqueville; you read "American History I." Sure, textbooks offer easier-to-digest summaries of the content, geared to the particular grade level of the student. They offer diagrams and illustrations and review questions and a glossary. But textbooks are always an assembly from a variety of sources, geared towards a classroom setting where the teacher leads students through the chapters and the exercises and the examinations. Neither the teacher nor the student is expected to be an expert. You just need to know enough to pass the test.

Digitizing that model of instruction changes nothing. Adding video changes nothing. Pinch and zoom and flashcards change nothing.

As for Apple’s $14.99 per student per year model for high school textbooks, Watters points out that a lot of high schools don’t buy new textbooks every year anyway, and if you look at that $14.99 per year as replacing an only slightly more expensive book that lasted several years, it may not be such a good deal after all.

And as for giving students their own permanent e-copy of the material, what student really ever wanted to keep a copy of his high school textbooks, anyway? And even if they had, taking advantage of it is still going to require getting those students their own iPads, an expensive (and currently far from universally-achieved) proposition.

She also has a few words for the iBooks Author e-book-making app, and its much-maligned license that restricts authors from selling their books through any other outlet than Apple. Apart from being restrictive, and providing no way to mark books that she wants to give away for free with a Creative Commons license, she notes that it is ultimately unnecessary—educators are already able to build their own digital textbooks, albeit without as “slick” tools as iBooks Author.

In the end, Watters writes, Apple’s digital textbook announcement is not the kind of revolution previously expected of Apple—it’s more of the same old same old, and “a slap in the face to educators and students.”

It really sounds like Apple set out to solve the wrong problem with this announcement, focusing on high schools when the real problem, and the much faster move toward e (since college students are more able to afford tablets), is college textbooks. It will be interesting to see what kind of deal Apple can offer them. But I can certainly see Watters’s point of view here—for high schools, this is not the sort of world-changer Apple has been known for in the past.

Next week, a German appeals court in Düsseldorf will decide whether to lift an injunction Apple was granted against Galaxy Tab sales in Germany. Meanwhile, the Düsseldorf Regional Court will be ruling on an Apple motion for an injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1N, which has been modified to work around Apple’s claims.

Will Samsung end up prevailing on the strength of the prior art it has gathered? I would hope so. There are only so many ways to make a tablet, and it would be ridiculous if Apple were permitted to act as a gatekeeper over any potential competitors.

(Found via CNet.)

The program will be great for college students, Siegler points out. The idea of textbook prices capped at $15 makes the sting of not being able to “sell them back” a lot less painful. (Assuming that $15 applies to college as well as high school texts, of course.) But iPads are awfully expensive for high schoolers or their parents to be able to afford, especially in places like the inner cities where such a device might not necessarily remain too long in its owner’s possession if it’s seen in the wrong place.

Even if when the next iPad is announced, the current model drops in price to something like $400 — or even $300 — that’s still an expensive sell to high school students and/or their parents and/or their schools. If every kid in the world already had an iPad, this would be the most brilliant program ever. Unfortunately, Apple needs to sell at least a few billion more iPads to get to that point.

Siegler suggests that, to get to the bright future where students are able to keep their books on their tablets, we need to see about getting tablets in those students’ hands first.

Who knows? Perhaps in a few years we’ll have found a cheap enough display technology to make that happen.

This represents a bit of a double-whammy for ad-funded media like newspapers and magazines—not only are they getting fewer sales, but they’re also losing the print ad views of the demographic of people affluent enough to afford an iPad. That may not bode well for their long-term future.

But Apple may have more up its sleeve than just an e-book creation application. It may be planning announcements having to do with digital textbooks, especially considering that the iPad has a great big screen and multimedia capabilities that the company hasn’t really tapped yet for textbook applications.

[Inkling CEO Matt] MacInnis sees Apple as possibly up-ending the traditional print publishing model for the low-end, where basic information has for many years remained locked behind high textbook prices. Apple can "kick up dust with the education market," which could then create visibility for platforms like Inkling. This could then serve as a sort of professional Logic-type tool for interactive textbook creation complement to Apple’s "GarageBand for e-books."

The Ars piece also notes that digital textbooks were one of Steve Jobs’s final projects, and might have originally been intended to announce back when the iPhone 4S came out in October. Jobs reportedly saw textbook publishing as an “$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction.”

It should be interesting to see what Apple has in store for us tomorrow. The idea of “destroying” the textbook industry sounds a little ambitious, but given what Apple’s accomplished over the last ten years it might just be entitled.

This is, of course, Amazon’s end run around Apple’s restrictions on in-app purchases—a way to provide an iPad-based Kindle store without having to give Apple 30% of its revenue. (An iPhone version will reportedly be out soon.) It looks just like any other application on the iPad, but as a web app it is not subject to Apple’s requirements. It looks very well-polished, and will undoubtedly help drive more revenue to Amazon.

China, of course, is infamous as a hotbed of pirated and counterfeited goods, though it has been trying to change that image lately. It would appear from this story that Apple has been a bit lax in verifying ownership of works it allows into its store—a charge that has sometimes been leveled against it on this side of the Pacific, too.

She notes that it’s currently possible for independent authors to get on the iBookstore through Smashwords, but the Apple program will be designed to give authors incentives to publish exclusively with Apple.

However, Smashwords’s Mark Coker is highly dubious about this rumor. He told eBookNewser that Apple already has a self-publishing program, and a system of carefully-vetted aggregators such as Smashwords who serve it.

According to Coker, there isn’t another retailer with such a rigorous qualification process for authorized aggregators. He said, “Unlike others, Apple actively encourages authors and publishers to deliver books through their aggregators. Apple realizes that they’re going to earn a 30% commission whether they source the book from an aggregator or from their own platform, and books sourced from aggregators are more profitable for Apple because they can be sourced at lower cost (no need to invest millions of long term dollars to maintain and staff their own platform) and greater scalability than from one’s own platform.”

What Coker says makes a lot of sense. Apple is the company that invented the 30% agency pricing cut, after all, and why would they want to spend big on setting up an infrastructure under which they’d earn exactly the same 30% they would if they let someone else do all the work?

Also, it seems unlikely that any right-thinking authors would want to publish exclusively with Apple, when they could publish with Amazon and Barnes & Noble who between them make up something like 90% of the e-book market. Why would anyone limit himself to Apple, by comparison a totally third-rate player in the field?

Whatever happens, I’m sure Apple will have a lot of surprises to unveil at the January event, its first post-Jobs show. The company always does. And perhaps some of them will have to do with e-publishing. We’ll just have to wait and see what they actually are.

The iBookstore team wrote in an email to iTunes Connect users: “ We strongly recommend that you do not schedule pricing changes through the interval pricing system in iTunes Connect that would take effect from December 22 through December 29. Pricing changes scheduled to take effect during this date range will not be reflected in the iBookstore and the book will become unavailable for purchase. We also recommend that you do not schedule any books to go live during the shutdown. Releases scheduled with a sales start date between these dates will not go live until after the shutdown.”

I imagine Apple employees need their Christmas time off, too.

Now it seems like Apple wants to make it so people can wear their iPhone on their wrist, and perhaps interact with it with Siri. And Google may be working on something similar. This all might lead, in the next ten years, to real “Google goggles”, or otherwise computerized glasses, that use the smartphone as their processing hub. Wouldn’t that be an interesting way to read e-books, having the text floating in front of your eyes?

But Kevin Fogarty on the IT World blog says not so fast, pointing out that the New York Times obtained this information from anonymous and unidentified sources. Without knowing who they are, it’s impossible to gauge such sources’ reliability—or their motives for revealing what they do.

No matter how convenient, cool and wearable our computers become, they’ll still only be a conduit for the information we get through them.

If more and more of that information comes from "people" hiding their identities and touting products they hope they’ll eventually be able to produce and sell, we might be better off sticking with the old, clunky technology we have to stick in a pocket instead.

Stephenson uses the example of the Beatles Yellow Submarine iBook, available for free from the iBookstore, which uses embedded Javascript to add interactivity. He suggests that this interactivity could be a great way for publishers to add additional revenue streams, such as the ability to purchase music from within the Yellow Submarine book.

While I will admit that it’s good to see appbooks that can be read from within the iBooks application, I’m a little worried about what this might mean for market fragmentation. Can other e-reading apps support Javascript in EPUBs? Is it even part of the EPUB standard? Or is iBooks going to be the only game in town for interactive works that don’t have to be installed separately?

I’m also a little worried that publishers will go overboard with these revenue streams. I already discussed the possibilities of product placement in e-books, comparing it to Taco Bell or Pizza Hut’s placement in Demolition Man. And in an online chat the other day, a friend of mine mentioned with consternation that The Hunger Games is getting its own line of designer nail polish. This probably has more to do with the forthcoming movies than the best-selling young-adult novels on which they are based, but can you imagine downloading a Hunger Games e-book and discovering you could tap a link within it to order these tie-in goods? In this age of declining revenues, will publishers be able to resist that kind of temptation?

But on the other hand, maybe publishers will manage to hold onto some common sense, or at least rationally weigh the risks and decide that the chance of additional revenue isn’t worth turning off the main consumer base. Or perhaps we could see some sort of “e-books with Special Offers”, in which people could pay full price for no ads or buy a version with product placement at a discount. And of course there will be books, like Yellow Submarine, where some form of product placement is natural. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see how it turns out.

(I will note that I didn’t know the Yellow Submarine e-book was free, and as a Beatles fan I’m going to install it myself and see what it’s like.)

PaidContent has a report on Cork, Ireland e-book wholesaling company ePub Direct receiving €1.3 ($1.69/£1.09) million in venture capital funding to grow its business. The company supplies titles to 116 stores, including Amazon, Apple, and Waterstone’s, and also serves over 15,000 online libraries. The article isn’t clear on who ePub Direct supplies them from, but I would imagine it’s mostly European publishers.

Now if only Amazon would let people read EPUBs directly on its Kindle!

However, Roberts points out, this may be putting too great an emphasis on the importance of e-books in the market. Unlike Amazon, Apple makes its money from its high-margin hardware, and the content is largely just a reason for people to buy that hardware. The only way the lawyers’ claims make sense would have been if Apple was trying to cut Amazon out of the tablet market all the way back in early 2010—when Jeff Bezos was still saying there was no possibility of a color Kindle device any time soon.

At any rate, there are so many lawsuits and investigations going on that it could take time just to decide how they will be handled in court. It will be interesting to see what comes of all this legal wrangling.