Apple's iBooks Author lets publishers quickly lay out existing text and add dynamic elements to produce interactive books. The application was created principally to address the textbook market, but can be used for any type of interactive book, creating .ibooks files that can be used on the iPad with Apple's iBooks 2 app.
iBooks Author can also be used to generate standard PDF documents, but those don't include live interactive elements, a feature that requires the browser-like HTML, CSS and JavaScript rendering of iBooks 2.
We don't own your content, we own our format
In the initial release, Apple's iBooks Author license stated:
"(i)if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution."
However some jumped to the conclusion that Apple was attempting to claim ownership of publisher's content, and stipulating that they could not sell their content on competing stores or for alternative ebook reader systems.
Apple has clarified the language in the license to indicate that its claims relate to the .ibooks format, which adds supporting technology to the author's content to enable interactive playback of various "widget" elements. The license now reads:
"If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple. This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format."
Unchanged in the license is the idea that authors who produce iBooks can distribute them for free any way they choose, which could include posting them on a website or distributing them via file sharing networks. Apple does not allow commercial distribution of its works in a way that would benefit third party stores at the expense of Apple, which designed the software and offers it for free.
25 Comments
Good News... and one can only hope that Apple will see fit to offer less-expensive iPads to the EDU market (US 250.00 would be near-ideal) so that we can see the true value of this effort.
I?m sure some people would rather Apple charged pro-level bucks for the iBooks Author tool, and then didn?t demand any cut of sales. But that?s not how Apple chose to charge for this, so those people will have to look at other tools... or just use iBooks Author for free but not use the .ibooks format. Then they can sell any way they like.
Good News... and one can only hope that Apple will see fit to offer less-expensive iPads to the EDU market (US 250.00 would be near-ideal) so that we can see the true value of this effort.
I believe we will see that price-point achieved soon, and cheaper still down the road. (I would NOT want to be selling competing PCs right now!)
I?m sure some people would rather Apple charged pro-level bucks for the iBooks Author tool, and then didn?t demand any cut of sales. But that?s not how Apple chose to charge for this, so those people will have to look at other tools... or just use iBooks Author for free but not use the .ibooks format. Then they can sell any way they like.
What iBooks Author does is only valuable in the iBooks format. You can poop out a PDF you can view on a Kindle, but that's not interactive or very useful, no dictionary, no interactive images, models or widgets. What would be the point? Would be better to generate raw HTML and convert that into the proprietary Kindle format, which at least the Kindle can search.
There's no real way to use the "value" of iBooks Author without iBooks. Apple just doesn't want Amazon selling iBooks that Apple helped create. It wants a cut.
That said, if Amazon or Google or anyone else reverse engineered an iBooks render app that could play iBooks, Apple couldn't really restrict anyone from distributing iBooks for free to non-Apple iBooks player apps on other platforms.
But without a business model, who would bother to do that? Neither Amazon nor Google even offer support open podcasts, because there's no easy money in it. They have the same reason to ignore iBooks. All it does for Amazon is make their static Kindle books look bad, and all it does for Google is give people a reason to by Android (but Google doesn't even care enough about apps, podcasts or anything else to make those work well on Android, so why would it take on ibooks?)
That said, if Amazon or Google or anyone else reverse engineered an iBooks render app that could play iBooks, Apple couldn't really restrict anyone from distributing iBooks for free to non-Apple iBooks player apps on other platforms.)
When that happens or when Adobe creates an authoring app and I suspect it will be fairly quickly, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Apple has some patents and legal IP that could be used to prevent the sale of such iBook format generators. Perhaps even prevent free authoring applications from being distributed as well.