Linked List: January 19, 2012

Thursday, 19 January 2012

No Embedded Fonts in iBooks Author Output 

Apple:

For best results with iPad, use the Format bar to select fonts; the Format bar’s font list includes only fonts that are available on the iPad, so the book should look the same in iBooks Author and in iBooks on the iPad. If you use the Fonts window to select your fonts, all fonts available on your computer will be listed. Selecting a font that is unavailable on the iPad may have inconsistent results when you view the book in iBooks.

Regular books from the iBookstore support embedded custom fonts, so this is a little disappointing. Hopefully it’s just a didn’t-get-around-to-it-yet 1.0 limitation.

Unprecedented, That’s for Sure 

David Smith, on iBooks Author’s licensing terms:

If I create a textbook using iBooks Author and then decide to made it freely available to the world (à la Khan Academy) I can do that without any restriction. Simple click ‘Export’ within iBook Author and the resulting file can be distributed by any means I choose and then loaded in iBooks. The mind boggles at what things may come out of this.

All Apple is doing with this restriction is saying that if you directly profit from this free tool and platform that we have created, then we deserve our cut. Which seems entirely fair to me.

I’ve been pondering this, and I’m thinking Apple’s perspective is about two things. First, it’s about Smith’s argument above. You don’t get to use this free tool to produce books that you sell directly to customers, circumventing Apple’s store. Think about the textbook business, where a publisher might sell thousands of copies of the same book to each school district. This isn’t just about selling iPads — Apple wants its 30 percent.

Second, it’s about not wanting iBooks Author to serve as an authoring tool for competing bookstores like Amazon’s or Google’s. The output of iBooks Author is, as far as I can tell, HTML5 — pretty much ePub 3 with whatever nonstandard liberties Apple saw fit to take in order to achieve the results they wanted. It’s not a standard format in the sense of following a spec from a standards body like the W3C, but it’s just HTML5 rendered by WebKit — not a binary blob tied to iOS or Cocoa. It may not be easy, but I don’t think it would be that much work for anyone else with an ePub reader that’s based on WebKit to add support for these iBooks textbooks. Apple is saying, “Fuck that, unless you’re giving it away for free.”

With these licensing restrictions, Apple is attempting to get the lock-in benefits of a proprietary file format without the proprietary file format.

The Audacious iBooks Author EULA 

Dan Wineman:

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. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented.

This is Apple at its worst. Let’s hope this is just the work of an overzealous lawyer, and not their actual intention.

Twitter Buys Summify, Gives Everyone a Reason to Use It 

I really like this idea from Mike Davidson:

As a closing thought, I’ve had this idea in my head for the last few years of what a perfect news site looks like, and it’s quite simple: a white screen with a list of 5 or 10 links that changes once a day. That’s it. Here’s the tricky part though: the 5 or 10 links need to be THE 5 or 10 links that are most useful to me on any given day.

It’s Both 

Peter Kafka, early this morning:

We’ll know shortly. As I mentioned yesterday, the key thing to watch at the Guggenheim is whether Cue brings up reps from the big textbook publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill onstage, or whether the focus is on letting educators and others build their own books, so they can bypass both the publishers and the antiquated textbook procurement system.

Ends up it was both. And I think both efforts revolve around iBooks Author.

AnandTech Reviews the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich 

Typically thorough and thoughtful:

I’ve said this before but I do believe that Apple is trying to deliver more of an appliance experience, whereas Google is providing you with a modern take on a traditional computing experience. If the appliance is a smartphone, then both approaches are equally capable — it’s just a matter of personal preference. […]

ICS is smoother, more polished and has its own set of new features that make it a significant step forward for Android. What ICS is not however is an outright clone of iOS. If you prefer the iOS experience to Android, ICS will do nothing to change your opinion. If all you were missing from Android was a smoother UI, then its fourth major release should be almost everything you could ask for.

I agree wholeheartedly. ICS is the first release of Android that feels like a true major upgrade. It hasn’t been changed so much as it’s been polished and refined.

Macworld Coverage of Today’s Apple Education Event 

Probably your best bet for live coverage.

Sony Ericsson Q4 2011 Results 

Xperia Blog:

Sony Ericsson calculates its own Android market share at 10% in volume and 7% in value during Q4. In the past, Sony Ericsson has always talked about aiming to be the number one Android vendor, however, there [were] no such targets mentioned in this morning’s conference call. Perhaps, these targets are being reassessed by Sony following the acquisition of the Sony Ericsson joint venture.

Perhaps.