COMMENTARY | To all accounts, the new iBooks Author app -- now available in the Mac App Store -- works as expected. It allows people with little or no training to create picture books, textbooks, and other interactive ebooks, using a simple, iLife-style interface reminiscent of a "Garage Band for ebooks."
Anyone with an Intel Mac running Snow Leopard or later can use the app to write, publish, and sell their ebooks through Apple's iBooks store. And anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch can buy and read the ebooks, and use their interactive features like 3d models and built-in quizzes. College textbooks sold through the app are supposed to cost about $14.99, with free updates and revisions, and publishers including McGraw-Hill and Pearson have already signed up for the program according to ABC News' Ned Potter.
So what's the problem?
People, including lawyer Dan Wineman, are starting to note the extent of the lock-in with the iBooks program. Especially iBooks Author, which Wineman says requires you to sell your books only through Apple's iBookstore.
As he notes, it's not a technical limitation. You can email the book to yourself, and it would open in the iBooks app on your iPad. Someone could technically open a store online and sell iBooks she created, or Amazon.com could add them to its storefront. What prevents them from doing so is the language in iBooks Author's End User License Agreement, which says that "If you charge a fee" for your iBooks, you can only sell it through Apple's iBookstore.
How the lock-in happened
Schools are already dependent on only a handful of big textbook publishers for their course material, in much the same way that four music labels dominate the United States' music industry. Just as Apple managed to dominate digital music by becoming those labels' biggest retail channel, it can now scoop up the textbook market by providing the digital publishing outlet those textbook publishers lacked.
Efforts to provide free digital textbooks already existed, like MIT's OpenCourseWare, but largely haven't made a dent in the textbook publishing world.
Apple in education
Beyond locking writers into using a single bookstore, the larger issue may be one of trusting one company with all electronic textbooks. If iBooks can only be created on a Mac and viewed on an iOS device, where does that leave schools and students with Windows PCs and Android smartphones?
Apple has already made the controversial move of promoting its retail stores as school field trip destinations. Requiring students to purchase an iPad just to buy textbooks would give the company an even longer reach into public educational institutions.
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