I needed a little bit of time to collect my thoughts on this and restrain my fanboy-ism. Let me start out by saying that I think it has the potential to be a great device and to be a category killer. The category in question is netbooks. Small, low powered notebook-like devices designed primarily towards web browsing and basic office tasks. These typically have a long battery life. The only place the iPad doesn't beat a netbook is on price, and price competition has typically not been a part of Apple's marketing strategy.
I think iBooks looks very interesting indeed. It is in ePub format, which makes it a game changer. ePub is supported by a lot of different devices - Sony's entire ebook reader line, iPhone OS (using Stanza), Barnes & Noble's Nook reader, in addition to the software available for Mac, Windows and Linux that will handle ePub. I suspect iPhone OS devices are the only ones that will directly sync with iBook, but it should be possible to use other devices by copying the file as you would to a thumb drive. How all of this works out will depend upon how digital rights management is handled with the ePub file, there is no standard for it at the moment which means Publisher A may use a very sensible set of rules, while Publisher B may use DRM that is overly restrictive or hampers the operation of the reading software.
Another nice feature of ePub is that it has been around for a while, and there are plenty of people who are knowledgeable in working with these files. Tools for creating ePub files are abundant and available across all platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux). The barriers to being a published author are dropping fast.
When I was in high school, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I had the opportunity to attend a writers workshop as part of my junior year English class. Nothing in the entirety of my academic or professional career did as much to turn me off towards writing as a profession as that workshop. It wasn't criticism that steered me away from writing, it was the business model.
The focus of the workshop really had nothing to do with writing as a craft, it was focused on how to get your work published. They showed off the writers guide and taught us how to read the entries, how to decipher what each publisher required from their submissions, etc. They had published authors describe how they got their book published. Send in your manuscript to somewhere between ten and thirty publishers per day, wait for a response, continue submitting. The average time until publication seemed to be about three years. They also talked a little bit about intellectual property law as it applies to publishing. It is baroque in the extreme. First rights, anthology rights, magazine rights, audio rights, and on and on. It doesn't surprise me that piracy is so rampant. Professional authors and lawyers have difficulty with the subject, how is a layman that has no interest in anything but reading content supposed to know or care about this? I'll save my rights rants for another essay though, you're welcome.
Electronic publishing is by no means a new thing, nor is the ease of access new. In the late 80s I downloaded my first electronic book. This was a few years before I had my first internet account - I got it from a BBS in Clearwater, FL. It was huge, weighing in somewhere around 1.2 megabytes. I think it took about three hours to download. It was the Jargon File, a dictionary of computer terms and geek folklore. These days you can find it here if you're interested. It was created as an ascii text file, browsing through it was slow and ponderous.
The real trouble with eBooks has always been formats. Because no single format has managed to emerge as the standard, there is always the question of "will my device or program read this?", "can I port this to a new device?", "what format should I publish in as an author?" The web itself is a great platform for publication, easy, simple to update, cross platform and available to a wide audience. The two problems with the web as a publication platform are 1) how do I make sure my customers can find my content? and 2) how do I monetize it? The iBook store solves both problems handily.
The iBook store has a large existing customer base on two of the three platforms (sadly, iTunes is not available for linux and I doubt the iBook store will be either), it has search and is organized as customers would expect. A striking difference between it and Apple's App store - but I won't get off on that rant.
The dollar and cents part is still an open question at this point, and a place where publishers can really trip this up. The customer expectation is that eBooks should be less expensive than their physical counterparts. This is not an unreasonable expectation. While eBooks do provide additional utility such as search and annotation, these features are not a selling point for most readers - they are attractive primarily to students and academic professionals. On the value negative side, you do not own a physical thing when you own an ebook, you own a license to use the content. This license if full of incomprehensible legal jargon, but usually the gist of it comes down to the fact that the retailer or the publisher may pull (or deauthorize) the content at any time, and without providing reason or recompense. This is well illustrated by the 1984 debacle on Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, see this New York Times article for details. While I believe the resolution provided by Amazon (replacement with a legal edition of 1984 or a refund of the purchase price) was ethical, the readers who had annotated the book lost their work. Additionally, readers are smart enough to know that electronic editions of a book cost a fraction of what a printed edition does to produce. Far too often, the pricing on the ebook edition in Amazon's store is very close or on occasion exceeds the MSRP of the printed edition. Additionally readers know ebooks cannot be loaned, resold or traded. B & N Nook does have a very limited and largely worthless loaning feature. I do not expect to see a similar feature in iBook.
I want to point out this article from A Newbies Guide to Publishing (which I just subscribed to) on the monetary differences between traditional publishing and self-publishing in eBook format. I would like to particularly draw attention to the pricing differences between his works published with Hyperion books (an arm of the Disney media empire) and his self-published works on the Kindle eBook platform. Hyperion is coming in at traditional paperback retail pricing, which runs from $5.99 - $9.99. Looking at it from a retailer's perspective, the numbers on his Hyperion books are not exceptional. No offense intended. Now look at his self-published work. It is sold very cheaply, but the numbers are considerably higher. Simple business 1000 level stuff, but publishers seem to have forgotten it. You can see the same process repeat itself on the iTunes app store. Software priced at the $9.99 or greater mark has few sales, at the $.99 to $1.99 level, lots of sales.
I've wandered a bit from my original topic, and there is a lot more that I want to say about this issue, but I think it is time to wrap this up. I think the iPad will be very successful based on what I've seen. I think the iBook Store will be good for publishers if they can put aside their experiences with more traditional publishing models. I think it will be a boon to small publishers and authors interested in self-publishing. Most importantly of all, I think it will be great for readers.
