What's most infuriating to me about all this is that Apple had an opportunity to play fairly and still win. Wrapping themselves in the education flag is a transparent attempt to win praise and deflect criticism. All school districts have to do is buy one iPad for every student and buy textbooks through the iTunes Store, and their problems are solved. But when that format is built around non-standard extensions to the CSS rendering model and all of the XHTML and the CSS are built around that extended model, the file is likely to forever be useless and unreadable in other reading systems.Ĭynically, Apple is positioning this authoring tool and the new format as the savior of K-12 education. The differences between the iBooks 2.0 format and ePub3 seem all but trivial. Oh, and changing file extensions from ibooks to epub or vice-versa does not help either. It does not work, all markup is lost, it pastes text. But wait, can we open an EPUB3 or a regular HTML document into another app and copy/paste the content inside IBA? I tried from an HTML instance in Safari and from an EPUB reader based on Safari. iBooks Author is not able to reopen iBook it exported in their pseudo-EPUB3 format because there is no Import mechanism! That means that on one hand EPUB3 readers cannot reuse a document created by iBooks Author because of its HTML/CSS/Namespaces extensions, and on the other iBooks Author cannot create an iBook from an existing EPUB3 document because it cannot import it. A wysiwyg EPUB3 editor will not be able to edit correctly an IBA document because of the different mimetype and the proprietary CSS extensions. So there's no question that EPUB is still at the core of iBooks Author.īut the differences are substantial. The cover and table of contents were a mess, but the content itself looked just fine. epub, the book opened properly in the free, open-source Calibre e-book management program. I tried creating a book using a formatted Word document and iBooks Author. The designers of iBooks Author went to great lengths to make sure that the program will not work with "the industry-leading ePub digital book file type." But it's not at all an EPUB3 format and here's why. That is, they do not want to have to worry about making sure that the output of iBooks Author is readable in ePub reading systems.ĭaniel Glazman, co-chairman of the W3C CSS Working Group, see the same problem: In and of itself not bad news, but it is a clear indicator that Apple doesn’t want this to be treated like ePub. The mimetype iBooks uses for these files is application/x-ibooks+zip. But that "mostly" is problematic:Īpple’s new format is mostly ePub3. Apple's textbook plan's biggest flaw is that it's tied to the iPadįirst, there's the issue of mimetype, which defines how an ebook reader parses a digital book file.īaldur Bjarnason, an expert on digital publishing who earned a PhD for his work on ebooks and interactivity, says "Apple's new format is mostly ePub3".Apple's iBooks Textbooks initiative is a welcome and natural progression.The poor get poorer and the rich get richer with Apple's iPad-based textbooks.Apple announces iBooks 2, Textbooks, iBooks Author.Amazon: "Primed" to disrupt Apple's textbook plans?.Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement.
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