Daniel Eran Dilger
The conference, known as BEA (BookExpo America), is held in New York City in the Jacob Javits Center May 24-26. It lists Apple as being in booth MR6053, adjacent to major book publishers including Random House, Hachette, Macmillian, Scholastic, Disney Books, Penguin, Rodale, and Wiley.
The expo says Apple will be represented by iBookstore's Scott Simpson and notes "Private meeting room: publishers, please contact us to reserve a meeting time."
Apple just launched its iBookstore last April in conjunction with iPad, and has since noted that 100 million books have been downloaded.
According to a Goldman Sachs report from February cited by a report by PaidContent.org, Apple is the third largest ebook seller, behind Amazon's 58 percent leading share of the market, Barnes & Noble in second place with 27 percent, and ahead of Borders-Kobo's 7 percent fourth place spot with 9 percent of ebook sales.
In March, Apple announced that Random House, the only remaining major book publisher absent from the iPad's iBookstore, was now on board, just prior to the launch of iPad 2.
Apple has increasingly pulled out of major appearances at industry trade shows, including Macworld Expo and NAB, noting that it can more effectively reach its customers through its expanding network of retail stores. BEA is differentiated in that it caters to the publishing industry rather than end users.
Wesley Hilliard
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
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William Gallagher
18 Comments
Apple just launched its iBookstore last April in conjunction with iPad, and has since noted that 100 million books have been downloaded.
I use my iPad for reading books and have yet to purchase anything from iBooks. I'd really like to since it has a more elegant user-interface, but the prices compared to what Amazon offers has usually been about 50% less. I can't justify that much of a price increase, so I've been using Amazon's Kindle app but it is rather clunky compared to iBooks.
I use my iPad for reading books and have yet to purchase anything from iBooks. I'd really like to since it has a more elegant user-interface, but the prices compared to what Amazon offers has usually been about 50% less. I can't justify that much of a price increase, so I've been using Amazon's Kindle app but it is rather clunky compared to iBooks.
Presumably the Kindle apps and WhisperSync mean that you can read your Kindle books more seamlessly across your Apple devices than you can iBooks books. This looks like an easy thing for Apple to duplicate on their own platforms, and would make Apple devices into an eco-system, but it's not there. It seems strangely awkward.
I use my iPad for reading books and have yet to purchase anything from iBooks. I'd really like to since it has a more elegant user-interface, but the prices compared to what Amazon offers has usually been about 50% less. I can't justify that much of a price increase, so I've been using Amazon's Kindle app but it is rather clunky compared to iBooks.
Most of the time, that's not true. A few times, books were cheaper in iBooks. I use the Nook app, the Kindle app, and iBooks. It's difficult to tell who will have the lowest price. But the problems are much more annoying than that.
There are a number of authors who write series, and even for those who don't, having some of their books in each reader is a royal pain. In order to know where the last book is, and what the name is before buying the latest is a problem, unless you buy all of an author's books from the same store.
I'm hoping that some day, we can move books between all the readers, or that one reader comes out that will allow us to buy books from all of the major stores. Right now, there is nothing like that around that works well enough, or at a decent pricing.
Lose the DRM and I'll start buying. Simple as that. They made the right decision with music, still awaiting the right decision on books (and video).
Funny. Personally I much prefer the Kindle App. iBooks is big on eye candy, but to me Amazon have really made a nice eReader app - everything just seems so much more thought out.
Its the little things like being able to reverse screen so the text is white with minimal effort, while on iBooks I have to go and change the whole system to do so.
This is quite uncharacteristic of Apple, as usually their apps kick arse, but I would choose the Kindle app every time. I hope Apple can rectify this with some updates.