That's the title of an article in KQED Mind/Shift.  It contains a lot of information and links. Here's a snippet: Apple’s announcement last week about its new iBooks2 and authoring app created big waves in education circles. But smart educators don’t necessarily need Apple’s slick devices and software to create their own books. How educators think of content curation in the classroom is enough to change their reliance on print textbooks. As the open education movement continues to grow and become an even more rich trove of resources, teachers can use the content to make their own...

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...

That's a point I never thought about.  Storage space on iPads is limited, and the price of the iPad goes up a lot as you get units with more memory.  Chris Maxcer makes this point in an article in MaNewsWorld: E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth, however, is free -- at least, a preview and a sample chapter is free. Good enough for me. I downloaded all 965 MB of it, and this is only for a partial e-book. One of the other e-books, Pearson's Biology, boasts a print length of 1,791 pages and a digital size of 2.77...

Apple’s recent publishing event raised many complaints about restrictive publishing rules for books created with iBooks Author application. In my opinion people don’t complain about iBooks Author or iBooks 2. The weak part is somewhere else – it’s the iBookstore. I’m sure that if Amazon launched something similar to iBooks Author, not that many people would have complained about that. Kindle Store is closed (though not as closed as iBookstore), but it’s the largest and most advanced ereading ecosystem, available to users of the largest possible number of devices. For now on, the iBookstore is the average store with overpriced books and...

On Hack Education, Audrey Watters has a fairly long look at why Apple’s new textbook announcement may not be as revolutionary as expected. She was not impressed by Apple’s presentation, stating it lacked Steve Jobs’s magic touch, “the kind of thing that made both fans and skeptics say, ‘Yes, (perhaps) this changes everything.’” She points out that Apple is partnering with the three companies that already make up 90% of the textbook industry, and they have already gotten into digital textbooks (to the tune of $3 billion last year by just one of them). One of...

Another ruling from a European court on the Apple vs. Samsung lawsuits over the Galaxy Tab’s design has come in, and it doesn’t bode well for Apple. An appeals court in The Hague, Netherlands dismissed Apple’s patent-infringement attempt to get the Galaxy Tab banned from sale in the country, following up on Apple’s appeal after a lower court’s similar decision in August. The court made its decision based on at least two pieces of prior art for each of Apple’s claims, determining that Apple’s claims were therefore narrow enough that they had not been infringed. Next week, a German...

That's the title of an article by Peter in Publishers Weekly.  Here's an excerpt: Any library fighting to preserve access to digital books faces an nearly impossible task when confronted with Author’s new ibooks. There’s no independent platform capable of hosting these books beyond the iBookstore, and no way to drive lending. Readers wishing to take advantage of ibooks must be Apple iPad users, and no library will be maintaining an inventory of iPad bling until iPad pricing drops far lower than it is now. Even then, the tying of the ibooks...

While the Digital Public Library of America has been fixated on arcane library-and-museum concerns, Apple is unveiling an e-format that might lock in millions of teachers and students in the U.S. and elsewhere Very possibly the new multimedia book product may ultimately jack up costs in K-12 and elsewhere. The new format will let students rotate and explore 3D objects, among other features. That’s good. But via hardware-related exclusives, Apple for now is locking up the new related to the hilt, playing up the ease of authoring for the format. Probable result? Higher hardware prices for schools, students, businesses and consumers than otherwise,...

Very Impressive Live Coverage of Apple Event from The Verge (each post with an image). New: iBooks 2 for Education (iPad) Apple’s iBooks Textbooks for the iPage Homepage (with Video) Official News Release Download AppNote: Apple is Making a Preview Release of E. O. Wilson’s Life on Earth. Free. Download here. What’s New With Books 2 App? (via the App Store) Experience gorgeous Multi-Touch textbooks designed for iPad iBooks textbooks are filled with interactive features, diagrams, photos, and videos Tap to dive into images with interactive captions, rotate 3D objects, swipe through image galleries, watch videos in full screen, and more Use a finger as a highlighter when swiping over text in a...

From The Register: Apple is ordering fewer 9.7in, 1024 x 768 IPS LCD panels but it hasn't cut out the part entirely. That suggests it does indeed plan to continue selling the iPad 2 after the LTE-equipped iPad 3 has gone on sale in March. According to whispers from the Asian display supply chain, the Mac maker asked for 1m 9.7in, 2048 x 1536 panels in Q4 2011, but has upped that to an estimated 6-7m units in Q1, DigiTimes reports. It will increase the order count further, to 10m units in Q3. As demand for the higher-resolution panels rises, so orders...

Here’s some irony for you. TheNextWeb reports that a coalition of nine well-known Chinese writers is suing Apple for 11.91 million yuan (US$1.88 million) for selling illegal e-books of their works on its App Store. The writers have asked Apple provide copyright certification of all works being sold on the App Store, but Apple has declined to do so. 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...

Available in the App Store is the First Folio: This is an exact facsimile reproduction of the large and handsome book known simply as the ‘First Folio’, the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare’s ‘Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies’. It was printed in 1623, seven years after his death. This eBookTreasures edition is taken from an exceptional copy held at the British Library. Eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays had already been published in the small, cheap format known as quartos during his lifetime, including such favourites as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. The first Folio added another eighteen, including Macbeth, The...