ibook

From Aug 24-30, Kaplan study guides are FREE at the iBook store on your Apple iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch! Caveats are: the only way to access the iBook store is via the iBook application, which requires iOS 3.2 or higher. If you or your library have devices that meet this criteria (and if you don’t, you really should update your devices), go take a look!

Apple has decided to allow individuals to publish their own works in the iBookstore via iTunes Connect…although it isn’t necessarily easy. You could already do this through a third party such as Lulu, and doing so might be easier, as they take care of getting your ISBN and such. But if you have a Great Work that needs to be read on the iPad, and want to…

• Get your own ISBN
• Get an Employer Identification Number from the IRS
• Create and validate an ePub of  your work

…you, too, can have your work featured in the iBookstore.

More details emerged about Apple’s upcoming iBook app just a few days ago when the iPad preorders began. Two things were confirmed that will be of interested to libraries and librarians, I think.

The first is that Apple finally confirmed that you will be able to load non-DRM ePub books onto the iPad via iTunes syncing, in addition to being able to purchase DRM titles directly from Apple. This is great news for anyone who likes reading the classics, as sites like Feedbooks already have nearly all their titles up in Non-DRM ePub format. It’s also good news for booksellers who deal in non-DRM titles, as they will be compatible with Apple’s new “magical” device.

The second, and for my money, more interesting bit of info is that it looks like Apple is defaulting to allowing text-to-speech functionality, the same thing that got the Amazon Kindle into trouble with the Author’s Guild. According to the page linked above:

iBooks works with VoiceOver, the screen reader in iPad, so it can read you the contents of any page.

If I’m parsing this tiny bit of information properly, that sounds like iBook hooks into an OS level text-to-speech convertor, which means that the iPad may be a very capable device for the visually impared. I will be very, very interested to see whether the Apple VoiceOver technology is controlable at the individual book level, and whether publishers can choose to disable it for given books as they do for the Amazon Kindle.