ARTS & FARCES internet

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.

What do Utne Reader and the Westboro Baptist Church have in common? Why, Topeka, Kansas of course. The venerable figurehead of the alternative press has announced its move from Minneapolis to Topeka after two more issues. Predictably, none of the Minneapolis staff will be making the transition.

Topeka-based Ogden Publications purchased Utne Reader six years ago from Nina Utne. I was the publication’s webmaster and online managing editor at the time and figured the writing was on the wall when Bryan Welch, Ogden’s publisher and editorial director, came into town and opened a meeting by telling the executive staff how to prevent dogs from killing chickens. I think there might have been a metaphor in there somewhere, but it went over my head. I liked Welch fine, but I was gone within days of the deal closing. Welch comes across as a country boy—he and his family farm 50 acres in Lawrence, KS—but he’s no hayseed, with a master’s from Harvard in media policy and management.

Neal Justin, writing for the Star Tribune, broke the story and cites Utne Reader editor-in-chief David Schimke as saying, “It’s a bummer. Everyone around here is in shock.” But much more interesting is Justin citing publisher Bryan Welch as saying “the magazine has yet to be financially successful under Ogden’s ownership.”

The magazine was started by Eric Utne—who still writes for the publication—in 1984 as a sort of Reader’s Digest of the alternative press. Nina took over in 1999. Circulation topped 300,000 in the mid-1990s and has currently dropped to 115,000. Justin reports that Welch acknowledges that the move is a consolidation play, but Schimke is more blunt, telling Justin that “he thinks Ogden wants to cut the editorial budget from about US$500,000 to US$250,000.”

Two big things I’m going to miss with Utne Reader leaving town: The friends still on staff there and the remarkable, incomparable library (the biggest benefit of working there). Turns out the friends remain; here’s hoping each one of them lands well come spring.

[Disclosure notice: I was employed by Utne Reader 2002-06 as webmaster and online managing editor.]

Novelist Ewan Morrison told the attendees of the Edinburgh international book festival that books—as we know them—will be dead within 25 years, brought to their end by the digital revolution. The Guardian published a condensed version of his argument a couple weeks ago.

More importantly than the death of paper books, according to Morrison, will be “the end of ‘the writer’ as a profession.” He writes, “The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart,” arguing for the necessity of the traditional publishing system of advances and royalties.

Especially advances.

Morrison fears that writers will follow their musician, filmmaker, journalist, and photographer brethren in a “... dramatic, and in many cases terminal, decrease in earnings…,” blaming it mostly on piracy and Amazon, Apple, and Google. His piracy statements and citations are misguided (on his part) and propaganda (on the part of those he cites). Chiding authors who leave traditional publishing, Morrison maintains, desperately, that things must remain the same: “Authors must respect and demand the work of good editors and support the publishing industry, precisely by resisting the temptation to ‘go it alone’ in the long tail.” Yes, authors desperately need editors; but publishers? Not so much; especially not the big, corporate houses. It’s been decades since publishing houses actually nurtured emerging talent.

James Bradley, also a novelist, thinks Morrison’s screed should be read “as much as provocation as thesis,” and argues that paper books will evolve from consumer good to prestige object.

Bradley, like Morrison, falls into the piracy trap laid by the entertainment cartel and its fact-free propaganda. The entertainment cartel loves to cite each incident of piracy as a lost sale. It’s become something of a mantra, as if like the politicians they bought, if it’s repeated enough people will believe it. But it’s a lie; and a particularly nasty one at that. There’s scant evidence that piracy leads to lost sales; almost all of those sales would never have been made to begin with. Emerging evidence indicates that “pirates” are the media companies’ best customers.

In July, Douglas C. Merrill, Google’s former chief information officer and now EMI’s chief operating officer of new music and president of digital business, used his keynote address to tell attendees of the annual CA Expo in Sydney that after profiling the behavior of file sharing service users he discovered that those “thieves” were also iTunes’ best customers. “That’s not theft, that’s try-before-you-buy marketing and we weren’t even paying for it….”

There’s trouble in Apple’s iOS content walled garden. The Financial Times, instead of giving Apple 30 percent of its in-app subscription revenue has launched an HTML5 web app. Currently, the website is optimized for the iPhone and iPad but that’s just the first cut. The website will soon offer a clippings service allowing users to time-shift article reading. The Financial Times employs a metered access system—up to 10 articles per month are free for registered users.

The website itself is impressive, looking almost exactly like the native app. The user is prompted to add a bookmark to their home screen in Mobile Safari and the site loads full-screen, without browser chrome. This is an important development for HTML5.

By the end of the month, Apple will start charging publishers 30 percent for in-app subscriptions and simultaneously require subscriptions to take place in the iTunes App Store instead of directly with the publisher. More importantly, Apple solely determines what content it considers to be appropriate for use on its devices.

The Financial Times isn’t exactly an impulse purchase, so the benefits of Apple’s frictionless iTunes App Store ecommerce likely won’t be missed. The publisher would almost certainly rather maintain a direct relationship with its subscribers, retaining information about those subscribers for itself.

The Financial Times told Robin Wauters, writing for TechCrunch, that writing multiple native apps for multiple platforms is “logistically and financially unmanageable.”

Writers who worked for free for Huffington Post figure they’re owed a pretty big slice of Arianna Huffington‘s slice of the online publication’s sale to AOL in February for US$315 million. Said writers have been carping—presumably also for free—in virtually any online forum that will listen and now they’ve upped the ante by filing a class action lawsuit demanding US$105 million. That’s one-third of the Huffington Post sales price.

The lawsuit is spearheaded by Jonathan Tasini, no stranger to the courts when lots of writers are concerned. Tasini was president of the National Writers Union, 1990-2003; I was a member of the union during part of that time and found it to be singularly ineffective in a dispute with a publisher. It was discovered during Tasini’s tenure as president of the union that Employers Mutual Insurance, the union’s health insurance provider, was operating fraudulently and wrongfully denying insurance claims. Tasini was also the lead plaintiff in New York Times Co. v. Tasini. In 2001 the US Supreme Court found in favor of Tasini and other plaintiffs who had challenged the republishing of their work in electronic databases without permission.

Somehow Tasini and these writers have come to believe that they’re entitled to some portion of the proceeds of the Huffington Post sale to AOL. Near as I can tell these writers willfully agreed to provide articles to the Huffington Post without compensation—no one chained them to a desk and forced them to write—and now they want a piece of Huffington’s pie.

In a press conference earlier today, Tasini said, “In my view, the Huffington Post‘s bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation. She wants to pocket the tens of millions of dollars she reaped from the hard work of those bloggers….This all could have been avoided had Arianna Huffington not acted like the Wal-Marts, the Waltons, Lloyd Blankfein, which is basically to say, ‘Go screw yourselves, this is my money.’ We are going to make Arianna Huffington a pariah in the progressive community. No one will blog for her. She’ll never [be invited to] speak. We will picket her home. We’re going to make it clear that, until you do justice here, your life is going to be a living hell.”