Web Development

Today Apple announced that it will bring its ebook platform iBooks to OS X. This is somewhat surprising, in that Apple didn’t have iBooks support for OS X previously. It’s chief competitor, Amazon, has long had application support for desktop platforms.

All 1.8 million titles that comprise the iBooks marketplace will be available on OS X, and any books that you have previously purchased will available to you on OS X-based laptop or desktop.

New York, NY, May 8, 2013 – From May 29-30, 2013, the best minds in digital publishing will convene in the Javits Center in New York City for the highly-anticipated, perennially sold-out at IDPF Digital Book 2013 conference (http://idpf.org/db13). This year’s theme, Advancing Publishing in a Digital World, has already drawn an enormous crowd, with seats expected to sell out soon.

Some featured speakers and session insights include:

• Otis Chandler, Co-founder and CEO of Goodreads will share an update and tackle questions from the crowd, including: what’s next for Goodreads now that it’s owned by Amazon? What does the recent sale mean for the 17 million members, 530 million books and 23 million reviews?

• Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author and staff writer for The New Yorker will speculate on the digital future with Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek writer and author of the upcoming The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (NYSE: JWa, JWb), and Snapwiz, a Fremont CA based company that specializes in adaptive and personalized learning solutions, announce the launch of WileyPLUS with ORION, the initial offering to come out of a new partnership aimed at giving students highly personalized experiences that improve learning outcomes and go further to creating adaptive, collaborative, and interactive learning spaces than anything currently on the market.

Coursera, a leading massive open online course (MOOC) provider, today announced a pilot program with several of the top higher education publishers to expand the availability of their high-quality content and resources, to be facilitated byChegg, the student hub where students can access the tools and materials they need to succeed. 

Starting today, publishers Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Norton, Oxford University Press, SAGE, and Wiley will experiment with offering to Coursera students, at no cost for the duration of the course, versions of their e-textbooks, delivered via Chegg’s DRM-protected e-Reader. Coursera is also actively discussing pilot agreements and related alliances with Springer and additional publishers. The importance of rigorously developed pedagogical resources to learning outcomes has been well documented, and today’s announcement will link Coursera’s content to this enhanced learning process. While professors teaching Coursera's broad course offerings have until now been able to assign high-quality content freely available on the Web, they will now be able to work with top publishers to provide an even wider variety of carefully curated teaching and learning materials at no cost to the student.

Amazon has enhanced its Kindle iOS app with new features of benefit to anyone but especially to those who are blind or visually impaired.

Released Wednesday, the latest version of the app supports Apple's VoiceOver technology, which reads aloud text that you've selected. More than 1.8 million books in the Kindle store are compatible with VoiceOver, according to Amazon. More than 900,000 of them are less than $4.99, while more than 1.5 million are less than $9.99.

When EPUB 3.0 was officially unveiled at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, 2011, it was taken by many as the spec to end all specs.

At last, we could really get to work creating ebooks with all the things we’d always wished for — basic things like the sophisticated typography and layout we can do in print, and beyond-print features like video and interactivity — as well as some things we hadn’t thought to want, like global language support and rich metadata. Not to mention something we knew we should do but that was “too hard” before: real accessibility. Best of all, we could make just one file that would work the same everywhere…

The euphoria didn’t last long. Sure, EPUB 3 told us how to do all those things; but did they all actually work anywhere?

That was 18 months ago. Guess what? Progress happens.

The era of the monolithic print textbook is coming to a close. The Kirtsaeng decision is the latest indication that it is not sustainable.

Atavist, a multimedia storytelling platform which launched in January 2011, has received acclaim for its unique mix of longform journalism and an innovative content management system. In fact, the company has already received high-profile investment backing from the likes of Marc Andreessen and Google's Eric E. Schmidt. Co-founder, CEO and editor Evan Ratliff says: "We are this kind of hybrid outfit in that we're not solely focused on software or publishing. We are a media and a software company."

This media/software combo wasn't in the original plan. The initial goal was to be an innovator in the space called longform journalism, pieces of 5,000 to 30,000 words meant to be read in one sitting. "We started as an outfit that just wanted to do publishing, and a certain type of publishing: These short [pieces] between book and magazine [length]," says Ratliff — books that would be "multimedia" and "enhanced." "In order to that, we ended up developing our own publishing software to publish to multiple devices at the same time."

Random House, the world’s biggest book publisher, is dipping its toes into the wild world of interactive fiction.

Black Crown, the first “free to play online narrative game” from the publisher, is open for registration now but won’t go fully online until May, according to Random House rep Dan Frankin.

The usage of the “free-to-play” descriptor seems improbably apt, since “players” will be able to unlock new pieces of story content using virtual currency which can be purchased using real-life monies.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a Boston company with a venerable textbook heritage, said it has increased its in-house game development skills by acquired Tribal Nova, a Montréal-based educational technology company focused on developing digital games, products, and services for pre-school children.

Financial details of the transaction are not being disclosed.

Tribal Nova operates online learning services for young children in partnership with major media partners in North America including PBS “Kids Play!”