Last Thursday, Apple introduced its first education initiative in quite a long while. The iTunes Store has been expanded to include a textbook section. And iTunes U has migrated into app form.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson—among the largest educational publishers—have all agreed to provide textbooks in Apple’s new iBooks 2.0 format at individual price points of US$15 or less. Schools can bulk-license iBook titles, distributing redemption codes to individual students that can then be individually redeemed through the iTunes Store.
But the big news is Apple’s 1.0 release of its iBooks Author app for its Mac platform.
iBooks Author is an ebook authoring application that allows an individual to create interactive ebooks that contain virtually any form of media—static or interactive. Apple’s iBooks ebooks on its iPad (with iBooks 2.0; and only the iPad is currently supported) can now come to life with sections that are watched, listened to, interacted with, and yes, even read. With iBooks 2.0, readers can easily highlight text, make bookmarks, and take notes. The notes can later be retrieved as virtual 3 x 5 notecards.
Available exclusively through Apple’s App Store, iBooks Author is offered at no charge. And it’s incredibly rich while being quite easy to use—especially for a version 1.0 release. Drag-and-drop virtually anything into the application—text (formatted text from Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages), images, video, Keynote presentations, and raw HTML—and it’s handled automatically. Best of all, if you’re familiar with Apple’s iWork suite—Keynote, Numbers, and Pages—you already pretty much know how to use iBooks Author.
Templates are included for six media-rich textbook formats (Basic, Contemporary, Modern Type, Classic, Editorial, and Craft), but surprisingly there are no provided templates for relatively simple books. And building a template from scratch looks like it’s quite a bit more difficult than it should be. Almost certainly future versions of the product will contain additional templates for different publication types—magazines, newspapers, novels, and everything else. As will some sort of collaborative workflow. Right now, it’s a great tool for an individual, but most publications don’t get made that way.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that Apple’s end-user license agreement (EULA) for iBooks Author is also a version 1.0 release and is seriously flawed.
While iBooks Author is capable of exporting .pdf, what fun is that? To use the program’s native file format—which appears to be a heavily modified, incompatible, and proprietary version of the EPUB 3 standard (more on that below)—you must either give your work away at no charge or sell it exclusively through Apple’s iTunes Store. That doesn’t mean that you can’t repurpose your carefully crafted content for other platforms, it just means that what iBooks Author outputs natively must be either given away or sold exclusively through Apple, on Apple’s terms (including its 30 percent take of the sales price).
The relevant bits from section 2 of Apple’s iBooks Author EULA:
B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:
(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.
Apple will not be responsible for any costs, expenses, damages, losses (including
without limitation lost business opportunities or lost profits) or other liabilities you may incur as a result of your use of this Apple Software, including without limitation the fact that your Work may not be selected for distribution by Apple.
Making things even worse, Apple reserves the right to reject any submission and limits a ceiling selling price for each title to US$15. As Mathew Ingram, writing for GigaOM points out, this is Apple’s attempt to not only co-opt the K-12 public education system, but to wrest control of a major part of curriculum. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing—Apple certainly couldn’t do any worse than the Texas State Board of Education—I’m just saying we might want to think more before privatizing it.
For the commercial publishing market, Apple’s right to reject may actually be a benefit. Look at how Amazon’s offering has become polluted with spam books. Apple requires all submissions to have ISBN numbers which are available for sale exclusively from Bowker at prices ranging from US$125 for one, to US$1,000 for 1,000.
Like frogs in a pot of water that’s not yet quite boiling, anyone who’s rubbed up against Apple’s EULAs in the past will likely not be surprised. It makes complete business sense from Apple’s—and only Apple’s—perspective: Educators get a free platform to create textbooks that they can distribute to their students (and other educators) at no charge. So long as they have iPads. Meanwhile, Apple’s competitors stew in their own juices while their ebook market share presumably dwindles. And make no mistake, publications created with Apple’s iBooks Author can be outrageously compelling.
But for the rest of us, Apple’s onerous EULA is likely a deal-killer. As Dan Wineman pointed out shortly after Apple’s announcement, “Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty.”
Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s vice president of corporate communications had the same thoughts and tweeted Microsoft’s promise not to take a 30 percent cut, referencing the three core components of the company’s office suite: Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
But Apple’s iBooks Author is, after all, a free tool.
The more I think about this issue, the more I come around to believing that the EULA is not really that big of a deal. Have I drunk the kool-aid? Yeah, maybe; at this point I’m not sure. Apple’s in the business of selling stuff (and making sure that you want to replace your current versions of its stuff with newer shiner versions of its stuff). So, it gives away a tremendously useful application for creating ebooks, in order to juice its currently dismal third place in that business. If you don’t want to buy into Apple’s business model—and let me tell you that a 30 percent cut of the selling price is pretty much of a bargain for independent publishers—don’t; no one’s forcing you to use iBooks Author or iTunes Store. It’s an offer, not a mandate. There are other options available; they universally suck, but they exist.
Still, Apple asserting rights over a file format and what a user is allowed to do with the output from the application is—as far as consumer software goes—unprecedented. And then there’s the question of whether iBooks Author is really consumer software. At first glance yes, of course it is—that’s what the free distribution option is all about. On closer examination, I’m not so sure.
That said, Jason Snell’s analysis for Macworld is dead-on: Most publishers are not software developers and would rather spend their limited budgets developing content rather than coding.
But think how much more compelling iBooks Author would be if it exported to the industry-standard EPUB format. When Macworld‘s Lex Friedman and Dan Moren asked Apple’s spokesperson about this at the rollout, “The reply was that EPUB can’t support the many interactive elements offered in Apple’s new iBooks Author filetype,” writes Friedman. “But that answer doesn’t jibe: iBooks Author can export to .pdf and text, and neither of those formats supports inline slideshows or HTML widgets, either. I believe Apple’s real justification for not supporting EPUB is to lock in publishers to the iPad. And I believe that goal is a shortsighted one.”
If iBooks Author supported exporting to the full EPUB 3 open standard, publishers could use Apple’s platform for ebook creation for competing reader platforms, but the fullness of the native iBooks Author experience would be limited to the iPad. In short, Apple’s goal of increasing its sales of hardware and media would surely be met.
iBooks Author’s file format
iBooks Author’s native .iba file format is actually a zip archive containing XML files, property lists, and assets. It’s apparently incompatible with every version control system I’ve tried, which see only the blobbed zip archive.
The program’s published .ibooks file format is also a zip archive containing the same components. Only this one’s encrypted.
Baldur Bjarnason has the clearest examination of iBook Author’s file format that I’ve found. While most of the relevant file bundle components are almost valid XHTML5, the declarations used clearly indicate Apple’s not at all interested in supporting the EPUB standard. And the CSS files use so many undocumented extensions that they’re nearly indecipherable. “Apple has chosen to use custom properties to define strikethroughs, underlines, margins, and heights in various contexts, with no standards-compliant fallbacks, to get a level of control over the visual design that standard CSS does not offer,” writes Bjarnason.
Daniel Glazman, the co-chair of the W3C’s CSS working group, says Apple’s iBooks Author file format “(re-)invented the web totally incompatible with the web.” Glazman accuses Apple of doing what Microsoft tried in 1996-97 (remember embrace and extend?): “Implementing behind the curtains up to that point, extending standards but not disclosing the extensions, using unstabilized Working Drafts into shipped products, making the shipped solution incompatible with the rest of the market….” It didn’t work for Microsoft and we can only hope it won’t work for Apple.
In another article, Bjarnason points out that none of the provided iBooks Author widgets—Gallery, Media, Review, Keynote, Interactive image, and 3D—use Javascript. Javascript “is the only cross-platform and standard method for delivering interactivity in hypertext files, such as HTML or EPUB,” writes Bjarnason.
In yet another piece, Bjarnason sums up the pros and cons of iBooks Author’s file format. The one big con far outweighs any pro: “... Apple has forked the EPUB3 and CSS standards,” he writes. “It doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree, your opinion won’t alter reality.”
Unlike FrameMaker—especially before Adobe bought Frame; FrameMaker on a NeXT was my all-time favorite publishing platform—iBooks Author is definitively not a writing environment; it’s strictly for production.
Here’s hoping all of this is version 1.0 release bugs and will be addressed as we move further along. Worst case, Apple’s release of iBooks Author 1.0 will hopefully prove to be the tipping point for someone else to develop a similar tool capable of outputting industry-standard formats.
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