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Apple's iBooks textbook initiative, launched just last week, has clearly struck a chord in the market. Ditto its accompanying textbook authoring tool, iBooks Author. Both have taken off at a significant pace, according to a report by Global Equities Research. More than 350,000 textbooks have been downloaded via iBooks over the past three days. In addition, there have been more than 90,000 iBook Author downloads. iBook Author is a free authoring tool to create textbooks for Apple iBooks.
Apple makes such good software that people tend to forget that it is first and foremost a hardware company. Apple doesn't need to make a profit on its software, because the software exists to sell the hardware, which is much more profitable. OS X is much less expensive than Windows, and iWorks is much less expensive than any one standalone program from Microsoft Office, because they are actually features of the hardware rather than standalone products. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Apple could give its software away for free without affecting its profits.
If Apple were a software house, its software would be like Microsoft's software, which runs on any hardware short of a Hamilton Beach toaster. None of Apple's software runs on other platforms unless by doing so, it sells Apple hardware. iTunes runs on Windows because it sells of iPods, iPhones, and iPads to Windows users.
We think of Apple as a Microsoft competitor, but that's hitting the nail on the thumb. You'd have to combine Microsoft with a PC hardware manufacturer to get a company that would be a direct competitor of Apple.
In this case, iBooks Author sells Macs and the iBookStore sells iPads. That's their purpose.
If Apple were a software house, its software would be like Microsoft's software, which runs on any hardware short of a Hamilton Beach toaster. None of Apple's software runs on other platforms unless by doing so, it sells Apple hardware. iTunes runs on Windows because it sells of iPods, iPhones, and iPads to Windows users.
We think of Apple as a Microsoft competitor, but that's hitting the nail on the thumb. You'd have to combine Microsoft with a PC hardware manufacturer to get a company that would be a direct competitor of Apple.
In this case, iBooks Author sells Macs and the iBookStore sells iPads. That's their purpose.
iBooks Author presents golden opportunity
Posted by: akcoyote 2012-01-24 23:36:30 In reply to: Erika Morphy
It strikes me that the ePub/Kindle publishing 'program' which contains the functionality offered by Author and offers a file transfer process to Author could allow publication of the 'same' textbook on both Apple and competitive platforms.
The most reasonable source of such a development effort would be a collaboration between Adobe and Amazon. They have the talent, resources and deep pockets to challenge Apple on this, not to mention the incentives to justify the efforts.
The most reasonable source of such a development effort would be a collaboration between Adobe and Amazon. They have the talent, resources and deep pockets to challenge Apple on this, not to mention the incentives to justify the efforts.
