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...

From the Vook blog: People wax nostalgic about the smell of books, but no one pines for the smell of textbooks. They smelled like glue, they were heavy, and they were—usually—boring. So we were happy to read Apple’s announcement of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author: finally, a kind of book everyone wants to see go digital fast. It’s a great announcement for digital publishing, for readers, and for platform and tool creators like us. It also raises some interesting complications that we’ve spent months tackling. Here’s how we’re looking at this announcement at Vook. The Good eBooks Really Matter Finally, eBooks are coming of age....

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...

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...

From the App Store: iBooks 1.5 adds the following new features as well as some stability and performance improvements:• Nighttime reading theme makes reading books in the dark easier on the eyes.• Full-screen layout lets you focus on the words without distraction.• iBooks now features an improved selection of fonts, including Athelas, Charter, Iowan, and Seravek.• Beautiful new classic covers for public domain books.• A redesigned annotation palette makes it easier to choose a color for your highlighted text. ...

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...

From The Mac Observer: Apple said on Tuesday that the company has had 180 million downloads from its iBooks ePub book store. The news came during Apple’s quarterly conference call with analysts, and served to highlight Apple’s ongoing success with iTunes. ... Apple didn’t offer a dollar amount for its iBooks sales, nor did it quantify the number of units sold versus the number of units downloaded. Some books are downloaded to multiple devices per account, and some of the titles available on iBooks are free. Apple has never specified what it determines as a “download” from the...

Kindle has just launched officially in France at €99 and a decent seeming catalogue of French titles to go with the English language books already available. Of course Amazon has also opened the French market to self-publishers and independent publishers through their Kindle Direct Platform. Yesterday Google brought its UK ebook store online. Last week, iBooks launched in over two dozen countries around Europe. And this only six months since Amazon launched Kindle in Germany. It is clear now that the pace of adoption of ebooks will rise in Europe if only because availability of ereaders AND ebooks is increasing rapidly here. What’s more the price for the new Kindle, at JUST sub-€100...

That's right - free.  According to the iBookstore: The manuscript is illustrated throughout by Dodgson, who later commissioned John Tenniel to come up with the drawings we are more familiar with. This eBookTreasures facsimile edition has a transcription of the text throughout as well as superb narration by Miriam Margoyles. ...

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...

Back in June, Apple introduced a new iBook feature it calls Read Aloud, which is similar to Nook's Read to Me feature in that it provides a human voice narration that syncs to the onscreen text. In both commercial cases, the feature is meant primarily for children's books. Now Apple has updated its iBookstore Assets Guide to include instructions on how to add a Read Aloud narration track to your EPUB file. You can't access the latest guide unless you're a registered iTunes Connect member, but eBookNewswer has printed part of the relevant section: "You can create a Read Aloud book...