ENTRIES TAGGED "apple"
Anatomy of an ebook app
Lessons learned while building a top 20 ebook for the iPad.
"Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race" was featured by Apple (leading to a 3-5X bost in paid downloads) and for a time became one of the top grossing App Store ebooks. Mark Sigal discusses the lessons he learned while developing and marketing the title.
An expert view of unicorns and digital rights management
Kirk Biglione is a digital rights management (DRM) historian who brings a clear-eyed perspective to an inflammatory topic. While others jump on soapboxes, he actually does the homework. Case in point: Biglione’s in-depth look at the music industry’s stormy history with DRM.
The e-reader growth spurt of 2010
As TOC 2010 is held this week in New York, it’s clear e-reading devices are hitting their stride. This once-niche category is growing quickly. Publishing expert Liza Daly discusses the current e-reader market — Apple vs. Amazon, iPad vs. Kindle, etc. — in this video interview.
Rebooting the Book (One iPad at a Time)
The book business is under assault. Book sales have been stagnating for some time, Amazon is the industry's boogeyman, and more terrifying, book publishers have no idea how to market books in a world (largely) devoid of bookstores. Moreover, in the age of the always on, it's fair to ask, do people even still read anymore? Just as it re-envisioned the Media Player, the Mobile Phone and Mobile Computing, Apple is well positioned to reboot the Book with its forthcoming iPad Tablet.
Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road
My once-beloved San Francisco Chronicle has been "hollowed out," reduced to a thin pamphlet, thereby accelerating their subscriber attrition. Do you even know anyone who actually uses the Yellow Pages? Remember record stores? Whither Blockbuster? When analog media collides with digital media, "creative destruction" occurs with brutal efficiency — unless you can truly differentiate your offering, a tall task, but not an insurmountable one.
Would an Apple Tablet be an Ereader? Yes and No.
Last Friday the latest round of rumors of an Apple Tablet swelled considerably after a piece from Apple Insider asserted the device is now on the 2010 product roadmap. The news sparked considerable interest among publishers, who apparently see this development as a “Kindle killer” that will upset Amazon’s apparent dominance of the ebook ecosystem. It’s understandable from the perspective of a publisher, but if this device actually exists, it’s doubtful anyone at Apple sees it as an “ereader” any more than it sees the iPhone as “a GPS device.”
Long Tail Evidence from The App Store
Last week we released 16 of our books as iPhone Apps (and on Saturday added The Twitter Book), and there's some interesting Long Tail data coming in. We've seen Long Tail behavior in the data from Safari Books Online and from Google Book Search, though in this case it's about geography: even though regions like Colombia, Belgium, and Greece are…
iPhone Updates: Missing Manual Already #2; More Book Apps Hit iTunes
We released David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual as an iPhone App on Friday, and by Saturday it was already the #2 for-pay App in the Books category on iTunes (where it has remained, behind only the Classics App), and it continues to gain ground. In just four days, it has become one of our top sellers of the year…
Apple is Now a Phone Company
Apple reported stunning results for the last quarter, and it has clearly become a dominant phone company in a very short space of time. John Gruber from Daring Fireball has the real punchline, but his analysis of the results is excellent reading as a whole: The entire iPhone platform is only 15 months old. The cheapest model still costs…
Q&A with Developer Who Turns Ebooks into iPhone Applications
Tom Peck transforms ebooks into individual iPhone applications. In this Q&A, Peck discusses his development process and consumer response.