Fair’s fair. If we get upset over something Apple’s done, we should also mention when they fix it. So, remember the kerfuffle over Apple apparently claiming rights in the user agreement over commercial sale of any e-book created in iBooks Author? Well, Ars Technica reports that Apple has just released a patch to the app, and iBooks Author v1.01 includes a clarification in the EULA: it specifically covers only e-books generated in the interactive .ibooks format. (Emphasis mine.) If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated...

Rumors have been flying about the Apple event announced for later this month. It seems pretty obvious that it’s about time for a new iPad to make the rounds, of course, but Good eReader thinks that Apple is going to announce a new self-publishing platform. “Sources close to the matter have told us that they intend on launching a new digital self-publishing platform to get peoples content into the iBookstore,” writes Michelle Kozlowski. 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...

Baen has rebranded its Webscriptions program, changing the name of the site to BaenEbooks.com, redesigning its look, and renaming the monthly e-book package program to “Monthly Baen Bundles”. All account information and previously purchased bundles will remain the same under the new site, though users who have set up their Kindles to receive e-books by e-mail will have to authorize a new email address. Sadly, with this change Baen is no longer providing OPDS catalog support for downloading e-books directly to Stanza. This is disappointing given that some people (such as me) don’t have iOS devices recent enough to...

One of the benefits of electronic media is that e-book stores are never closed for the holidays—at least for purchasers. But in some cases, for publishers, it’s another story. EbookNewser reports Apple’s iBookstore team sent an email to iBookstore sellers letting them know that the iTunes Connect app and e-book publishing platform is down from now until Thursday, December 29th for the holidays. It will not be taking any new updates during this time, and scheduled releases and pricing changes will be delayed. The iBookstore team wrote in an email to iTunes Connect users: “ We...

On FutureBook, Richard Stephenson has a brief piece looking at the interactivity now possible in iBooks. Since iBooks 1.5 supports Javascript, this means that e-books can take upon themselves abilities formerly associated with stand-alone appbooks. 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...

PBS’s MediaShift is running a series on e-books this week, and not all the articles are as lame as the one I talked about earlier asking whether Amazon was short-changing authors. MediaShift’s business columnist Dorian Benkoil wrote a lengthy column complaining about the annoying maze of incompatibility and missing features that purchasers of DRM-locked mass-market e-books have to face. When given a book he wanted to read, Benkoil went looking for an e-book version that he could both read and have read to him, and thought that Google, which is pretty open, would have the best version—but was...

I’m not sure whether you can really call this “ironic”, as misused as that word often is, but it’s certainly amusing. Apple has notified some purchasers of the Steve Jobs biography e-book on iBooks that they should delete the current version and download a new version at no charge, Macworld UK reports. Apple confirmed to Macworld that the emails were genuine and the instructions were to fix formatting problems suffered by a small number of customers who had downloaded the iBook. No changes have been made to the content. Of course, this sort of...

At FutureBook, “namenick” has a post explaining why he sees Kobo as being much better-suited than Amazon or Apple for international expansion. In short, Kobo has much better international content availability. Where Amazon has been opening separate stores for various different countries and languages (most recently a French store), Kobo makes all content for all languages available from the same store. One example which shows why Kobo is ahead of iBookstore or Kindle Store – Smashwords. Books from Smashwords are theoretically available at Kindle Store, Kobo and iBookstore. The deal with Amazon doesn’t seem...

On PaidContent, Charles Arthur brings up one of the important facets of Steve Jobs’s legacy that tends to get overshadowed by Jobs’s hardware successes. Quite apart from all the gadgets Jobs designed, he also designed a new business model for the music industry: the 99-cent song. The headline of Arthur’s article suggests that Jobs’s great success was “persuading the world to pay for content,” but the article itself seems to take the opposite tack: the world was ready to pay for content, but Jobs’s success was in persuading the content-owners to sell it digitally. Arthur explains that...

One of my earliest blog posts about e-books, back in 2002 when I was writing for Jeff Kirvin’s “Writing on Your Palm,” was called “Whither the PDA D&D?”. I pointed out that, whereas fiction e-books had made the transition to portable e-format, role-playing games had yet to do so. Possibly one of the biggest obstacles was the way that so many of them depend on tables, which don’t tend to translate well to small screens. Given how big and thick role-playing game books tend to be, they would seem tailor-made for such a conversion—if someone could get around the...

If the iPad was supposed to be a magic bullet for e-books, why hasn’t iBooks made more of a splash in the e-book market? Jason Bennett asks the question in an entry on Melville House Publishing’s blog, pointing to the much higher Kindle (24%) than iPad 1 (13%) ownership among those waiting in line to buy an iPad 2, and Apple’s overall cageyness about iBooks sales in its quarterly report. Apple certainly hasn’t seen fit to go to some of the lengths Amazon or Barnes and Noble have for providing more avenues of sale for their books. There...

On The Bookseller, Philip Stone looks at the sales performance of a novel, Those in Peril by Wilbur Smith, that was sold in e-book form by Apple and Amazon for £5.99 ($9.79) while bookstores sold the hardcover for £13.30 ($22.07)—30% off its list price of £19 ($31.07). The novel sold remarkably well in paper, becoming Smith’s seventh consecutive hardback number one bestseller. One would think, Stone remarks, that such an inexpensive e-book should surely cannibalize the print sales—but that does not seem to be the case. Stone suggests that Smith must have gained more print readers than he lost...