Two weeks after Apple unveiled its iBooks Author program for designing interactive e-books, template king Jumsoft was there with its first set of iBooks Author templates, dubbed Book Palette. Jumsoft has now expanded that collection to 25 with the announcement of five new designs that offer “ … upmarket design quality at a reasonable price.” The five new templates include the crisp Decorum, the elegant Royal Title, and the colorful Taste Buds designs. All 25 templates contain the full set of standard sections and page layouts provided in the iBooks Author app, including covers, chapter pages, text pages, tables of contents, glossary pages and more....

This has been a year of tech experimentation for me. I gave up my clunky-but-serviceable Kindle Touch in favor of a slick, front-lit Kobo. I relegated my iPad 2 to work functions, and picked up a more ergonomic iPad Mini for home use. And I experimented with various apps in search of a perfect reading platform. I didn't find it. It is with mixed feelings that I declare the Kindle app the 'winner,' and give up on iBooks. Here's why: The Kindle can sync personal documents. That's it. That's the killer feature iBooks and Kobo and all the rest lack, and it...

A month and a half since Baen made the jump to Amazon availability, the publisher is about to add another feather to its cap. On her forum on the Baen Bar, publisher Toni Weisskopf has mentioned that Baen e-books will soon be available DRM-free in Apple’s iBooks store. A formal announcement will be made when the exact timeframe has been nailed down. As with the current Amazon deal, EARCs and monthly discount bundles will continue to be exclusive to Baen. The time since the program happened has seen some minor controversy erupt on the Baen Bar. After December 15th,...

Here I go, turn the page. On the NY Times Bits blog, Nick Bilton gleefully reports that the patent office has seen fit to award Apple a design patent on, of all things, the digital page turn used in iBooks. Bilton uses this as proof of the ridiculousness of the current patent system, as well as a reminder of the obnoxiousness of Apple’s recent patent litigation practices. But is this patent really as silly as it looks? As some people point out in the comments under Bilton’s article, the patent is narrower than Bilton makes it seem—it doesn’t cover any page turns,...

Seems like only yesterday that DC Comics was adding the Nook tablets to its formerly exclusive deal with the Kindle Fire platform, and releasing graphic novels via e-book stores. But the thing about DC on those color tablets was that the comics were actually sold through third-party stores like comiXology, or DC’s own app Vertigo. However, today DC announced it will be selling digital comics in single-issue (DRM-protected) format directly through the Kindle, Nook, and iBooks e-book stores. DC will start with current-release issues, then move into backlist titles. 70 titles were available as of today. At the moment...

  The appearance of the yet unreleased "iBooks 3.0" as a requirement for certain titles in Apple's iBookstore suggests the company will soon update its ebook client app for iOS, likely in conjunction with the release of iPad mini. According to a report by The Next Web, there is already at least one title in the French iTunes Store specifying iBooks 3.0. Under the title's "Requirements," which are generated by Apple and not potentially a third party developer's typo, iTunes specifies, "This book requires iBooks 3.0 or later and iOS 4.2 or later. The books can be displayed with iBooks on an iPad, iPhone (3G or...

Did you think that e-book vendors have a hard time with Apple here in the USA? Publishing Perspectives has a terrific (one might even say hilarious in some places) report on the frenetic activity engendered by Apple’s decision to launch its iBookstore in Latin America. Among other things, it asked Latin American publishers to redo their books’ metadata—and then changed its mind on how it wanted the metadata done three times over the course of several days. Apple’s preference for prices that end in .49 or .99 means trouble for the publishers who sell their books in their own...

Last year we covered Ars Technica publishing John Siracusa’s 27,000-word comprehensive review of OS X 10.7 Lion as an e-book, and the very successful sales numbers for a review that could still be read free on-line. This year, with the release of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Siracusa has done it again—but as the Nieman Journalism Lab reports, the process has not been without snafus. Since Mountain Lion was under NDA until the day it launched, that means that the e-book had to be submitted to Amazon at the same time the article was allowed to be published online...

Less than a month after finally coming to Barnes & Noble e-books, DC Comics has just placed its first graphic novel with Apple’s iBooks store. The recent graphic novel Batman: Earth One, a revised retelling of Batman’s origin story, will cost $24.95 in print but $12.99 agency pricing on the iBooks store. This will be the first DC book to show up on iBooks, but probably won’t be the last. DC already sells multiple books through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and it would likely not be too hard to bring them to Apple as well. Certainly,...

You wouldn’t think that you would find page-flipping on tablets. But many e-reading apps have it. iBooks has a page-turn animation, which it actually lifted (along with its wooden bookshelf display) from the iPhone e-reader “Classics”. Instapaper recently added page-flipping as an option instead of scrolling. Flipboard uses its own stylized page-flip, too (from which it takes the “Flip” part of its name, come to think of it). So why do developers use it so often? Because readers seem to like it. “Pagination is obviously an artificially bolted-on construct on the iPad and iPhone,...

CNet’s Sharon Vaknin has a 3-minute video (embedded below) in which she covers some ways of giving e-books as gifts. While the process is pretty simple overall, it is interesting to see Vaknin present video of how it works. Giving e-books as gifts with the Kindle or Nook is as easy as clicking on “Give As Gift” on the Kindle or B&N listing for the book. Both sites offer a time-delay feature in which you can choose a calendar date to have the e-book delivered. iBooks doesn’t permit e-book gifting, however, so all you can really do is send...

Interested in learning how iBooks Author works? On Ars Technica, Dave Girard has posted a 4-page-long review of the free e-book creator, with lots of screen shots. It goes into a lot of detail about what he learned in using it to create an iBooks version of his e-book 101 Autodesk Maya Tips. In short, Girard found that iBooks had some features he liked and a number of them he didn’t. A lot of the problems Girard had with the program stemmed from Apple limiting the options available to its users. There is no direct control over the...