The book Stevens created, an archive of a month’s worth of installments from his weekday comic strip, was first hosted on Dropbox, but demand caused the public folder he was using to be shut down. Once Stevens moved the file to his own server, he saw almost 8,000 downloads, leading him to surmise that at least 10,000 in total managed to get a hold of the iBooks Author-created tome.

Stevens called that performance “not bad for a file created by software which has only been out for a week on a single platform,” and we agree. Consider, for example, that the Financial Times‘ How to Spend It, a lifestyle magazine app from a world-class publication, took 10 days to reach 10,000 downloads last September.

Response to the format has been “overwhelmingly positive,” Stevens said in a blog post, but there are some downsides. First, he says bandwidth required to provide the downloads is a problem, which could be overcome by selling the via the iBookstore, but that entails additional costs and operating within the confines of Apple’s marketplace. Stevens says this isn’t palatable since he “[doesn't] like the idea of readers being geographically or economically restricted from downloading [his] comics.”

Apple adds this to every page in PDFs generated in iBooks Author.

The other problem is with how iBooks Author writes to PDF, since Stevens wants to offer the collections to anyone, regardless of platform. Apple adds branding to its iBooks Author PDF output, which Stevens says is understandable since it’s a free tool. He would have to spend additional time, then, creating a second version without said branding.

Stevens’ concerns echo some of those brought up by Vook’s Matthew Cavnar during a recent interview, but the webcomic creator seems excited about the potential of iBooks Author despite its limitations. We should see soon enough if Apple’s tools result in a flood of new iPad-tailored content from other independent creators in the months to follow. I predict it will, because despite the fact that iBooks Author may be tied strongly to only one platform, that platform also happens to be the best venue for digital comics consumption available today.

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In the introduction to the collection, called Waking Up With The Diesel Sweeties, Stevens talks about how he grew up wanting to do a monthly series, and how the iPad seemed the perfect venue for comics from the moment he saw one. He says “for every person who loves reading their daily comics every morning, there’s someone who’d love to grab a magazine of them once a month and soak them all up at once.” Hence his desire to do this iBooks Author-created edition.

iBooks Author has only been out for around four days at this point, but Stevens’ example shows it’s already stirring interest beyond textbook creators. Stevens created the book himself during “a few insomniac hours this weekend,” he says on his blog. The barrier of entry for using the product is so low it becomes a viable distribution option for independent creators looking to expand their audience beyond those they serve on the web, and if they’re willing to offer their product for free (Stevens makes income through online sales of goods tied to his comic), content creators can bypass Apple entirely and serve audiences directly.

To check out Stevens’ project, just download the .ibooks file from his website. If you’re on an iPad, it will open in iBooks, or if you’re on a desktop machine, you can simply send it to yourself via email or Dropbox. This is definitely my favorite use of iBooks Author so far, especially now that I’ve hit a creative wall with Dogs: Their Ways and Woes.

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The new iBooks interactive textbooks, which come from major educational publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson, among others, were unveiled last week at an Apple media event in New York City. The textbooks were the primary focus of the event, which also saw the introduction of iBooks Author, an e-book creation tool, and an iTunes U-dedicated iOS application. iBooks Author saw 90,000 downloads in the three days following its introduction, Global Equities Research said, but it didn’t share numbers for iTunes U.

That Apple would see 350,000 downloads of its iBooks textbooks immediately following their unveiling is not surprising, especially given that the store offers free samples, as well as one of its highlighted books free in its entirety. Curiosity, media interest and a desire to check out something new from Apple’s digital storefront would definitely all contribute to heightened interest.

The real test, however, will be whether or not Apple’s textbooks can keep up their momentum long-term. AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski points out that publishers are counting on higher volume sales at lower prices to make selling digital textbooks at $15 more profitable than selling paper versions at $75. But getting schools and parents to buy into a system in which books can’t be passed on from student to student, and which could potentially be paid for directly by parents themselves won’t be a simple matter. Not to mention that iPads are required to make the system work, which obviously represents a considerable expense in itself.

Over at ZDNet, James Kendrick has a good round-up of the arguments against Apple’s textbook initiative succeeding. He lists a lot of good points, but overall you get the sense that the biggest problem might just be a lot of hesitation from schools about adopting a model so different from what’s currently in place. Institutional inertia is not easily overcome, after all.

Three hundred fifty thousand digital textbooks downloaded in three days is definitely impressive, and could bode well for Apple’s textbooks initiative; people are obviously interested, and that’s a good thing. But the real test is yet to come. Download numbers following the kick-off of the school year next fall will definitely be a better time to make prognostications about the success or failure of Apple’s latest venture.

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iBooks Author

Creating layouts in iBooks Author is easier than any comparable tool I’ve come across, including Adobe’s InDesign and Quark Xpress, and the ability to instantly see on your iPad through iTunes how the final product will look and feel really helps with the design process. Switching between portrait and landscape orientation is as easy as tapping a button.

You can add any kind of media using a pop-up media drawer, or by dragging and dropping elements from your desktop. Apple provides ready-made widgets for interactive galleries, images, in-line video, chapter review, Keynote slide shows, 3-D .dae files and HTML code. Each of these offers additional custom settings, like captions and headings, to make sure you can present your multimedia elements exactly as you want. The interactive image feature is particularly cool, because it requires almost no media creation skills; you can simply upload your photos, then set view points that zoom in and pan on the image as required when clicked, and also provide a helpful description of what a reader is looking at.

If you just want to publish your work for private distribution, it’s easy enough once you have the elements in place; just hit the “Publish” button and save it to the folder of your choice. Then you can distribute the file to whoever you want, and they can manually upload it to their iPad via iBooks through iTunes.

For those looking to publish their title in the iBookstore, there are only a few more hoops to jump through. Create an iBookstore seller account at Apple.com, download the iTunes Producer application, create an active contract if you don’t have one at iTunes Connect, and then make a sample version of your book. Books on the iBookstore max out at 2 GB and are of course still subject to Apple’s approval process. Apple has more about the distribution process in its official iBooks Author FAQ.

I have a confession: I used to publish poetry anthologies in college when I was doing my graduate studies. I admit that here only to point out that this would’ve been a great way to create something like that quickly and cheaply. It’d be even better if Apple would update iBooks Author to also work with iOS’s Newsstand, but this is still a lovely start. Especially since while titles can be distributed through the iBookstore, they don’t have to be, with the big caveat that Apple’s licensing agreement specifies you can’t charge money for iBook Author books distributed outside its own marketplace.

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iBooks Author comes with a template choose to help you get started quickly, and then you can click and drag your own media to add images, video, audio and other content to your book. You can even add things like 3-D models, which we saw demoed in the iBooks 2 unveiling earlier, as well as interactive elements like image galleries.

Keynote presentations can be embedded directly, so you can include slideshows right within the book. This should really appeal to profs and teachers who want to create their own courseware and customize content. You can also create and link your own glossary definitions for terms, which can include interactive elements, and even add JavaScript and HTML5 code if you have knowledge of that technology.

Author tools include the ability to preview your e-book creations live on your iPad over a Wi-Fi network, which is amazing in terms of being able to get instant feedback about whether or not something works the way you’d expect it to. Apple is really taking the sting out of e-book creation.

Amazingly, Apple’s iBooks Author is free, and is available today on the Mac App Store (for Macs with OS 10.7 or later installed). This will definitely help attract content creators to the iBooks platform, and could also seriously impact the ability of competitors to sell publishing suites aimed at doing similar things.

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Here’s how it works, according to Roger Rosner, Apple’s VP of productivity software: Textbooks appear on the shelf, and then you tap to launch. The books occupy the full screen and can be paired with embedded video content and introductory movies. Multitouch is used to navigate textbook pages and can also help manipulate integrated 3-D models for biology books, for example. These books definitely go well beyond static text and even most media-rich e-books that we have seen to date.

Rotating books let you focus on text, and there are built-in, linked glossaries and tablets of content to make navigation a snap, plus everything’s searchable. It looks like Al Gore’s Our Choice, which we covered in depth at launch.

Textbooks in iBooks 2 also incorporate highlighting, note-taking and interactive Q&A sections at the end of each chapter, which also provide immediate feedback: No more hunting for a key in a separate book or appendix to see how you did. Notes and highlights are automatically turned into flash cards for study purposes. In short, it looks like Apple has taken a lot of the best aspects of services like Inkling and Kno and integrated them into its own product.

The new textbooks reside in a dedicated iBookstore category and will offer free samples before you buy. The iBooks 2 app is free, and it is available on Thursday via the App Store. Textbooks will be priced at $14.99 or less and will initially be aimed at the high school market. That’s some seriously competitive pricing, and Apple’s initial partners are Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which together are responsible for 90 percent of textbooks available, according to Schiller.

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It is pretty clear by now that Apple’s iWork productivity suite is an acquired taste. But soon, folks who are interested in publishing their content in the ePub format — an open eBook standard — might just develop a taste for it. Apple today released a new update to the iWork suite that makes it simple to export documents in the ePub format, allowing them to be read easily on Apple’s iBooks app for iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

In the early days, iTunes was a way to manage music libraries and for music playback. Over time, it became a standard digital music player, which helped with the sales by the iTunes store. In a similar vein, Apple is trying to get more folks to use its iBooks app, betting that it could become the de facto reader for electronic documents that are encoded in ePub or PDF formats. More usage would help drive visitors to the iBooks store.

Earlier today, Mathew wrote about people reading more with e-readers. Clearly, Apple is locked in a battle with Amazon for mindshare, and for now, Amazon is winning. Yesterday, Amazon said that its new lower-cost e-readers were selling like hotcakes. The ePub format is a competitor to Amazon’s proprietary Kindle-related format, and the support for it in iWork could help give Apple a leg up.

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Luckily, according to a new report by the New York Times, Apple’s higher prices aren’t necessarily a permanent thing. Instead, sources at the publishing houses who’ve made agreements with Apple suggest that built-in discounting provisions will result in book prices dropping as low as Amazon’s fast disappearing $9.99 price point.

Under the agency model Apple uses, it will take 30 percent of each e-book sale made, while the publisher gets 70 percent of the take to distribute between itself, the author and other involved in the making of the book. The agency model along with a complicated formula related to the price of print books led publishers to suggest that price points for new fiction and non-fiction releases would fall somewhere between $12.99 and $14.99. Publishers then took that higher price point back to Amazon and essentially insisted that the online bookseller institute a similar model.

Under Amazon’s model, the Kindle maker actually lost money on every e-book, counting instead on revenue from hardware and on building market share to turn a profit. The New York Times describes how this worked:

Amazon has effectively lost money on each sale at that price because it buys and resells e-books as it purchases printed books, by paying publishers a wholesale price generally equivalent to half the list price of a print edition. That means that on a $26 hardcover book, Amazon would typically pay the publisher $13, losing just over $3 on a digital edition it sells for $9.99.

The NYT’s sources, three people involved in the discussions between the publishing houses and Apple, note that even though books will indeed be sold at a higher initial price through the iBookstore, Cupertino built provisions into the agreement that would allow them to discount the prices of hot selling e-books, including those found on the NYT’s bestseller list. Apple wants the ability to undercut or match competitors’ prices for these books, which are often offered at significant discounts in other sales venues.

A book that becomes a bestseller could then see a price drop from say $12.99 to $10.99, or even as low as $9.99, according to the sources. Even books not on the bestseller list would be eligible for this lower-than-normal pricing, since it will be tied to the going print rate for the book. The $12.99 to $14.99 number is based on a new hardcover selling price of $26, and Apple wanted the ability to offer more attractive prices for books that have a lower starting print price.

Apple has the right idea. The reason e-books are attractive to many is a combination of convenience and pricing. But the pricing advantage only exists if consumers aren’t willing to wait for paperback editions of the books they’re purchasing to come out. If they are, though, they can probably buy a physical book at around the same price or lower than its e-book counterpart.

If Apple and its publishing partners really want to make a splash in the e-book market, they have to extend their policy of ultra-competitive pricing to the paperback market, too. $9.99 is, for me, the exact price at which I will opt to buy an e-book over a paperback, even if I can find the print version for slightly cheaper, owing to the convenience factor. I suspect I’m not alone, as Amazon didn’t just pull the number out of a hat. If Apple can hit that sweet spot more often than not for books that have been around for awhile, I’ll gladly give them even more of my hard-earned cash.

The iBookstore will allow for browsing and purchasing books on the iPad. What is exciting is that this new feature will rely on the ePub standard rather than some proprietary Apple format. ePub was developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum and works on several devices and platforms like the Sony Reader and Adobe Digital Editions for your desktop computer. You can think of it as the “MP3″ of e-book formats.

Five large publishers (Penguin, Harper Collins, Macmillan, Hachette Book Group, and Simon & Schuster) announced support today and the store will be open to other publishers soon. Not surprisingly, McGraw-Hill was not on the list of large publishers today.

So is the iPad a Kindle Killer? I think the biggest advantage that Apple will bring to the e-book reader market is a reading experience that is on par with the Amazon Kindle, but on a multi-purpose device that will have wider appeal. Apple has absolutely nailed the relationship between devices and content stores in the past with the iPod / iTunes Music Store and the iPhone / App Store and I expect that the iPad will nail the e-book experience on both the device and the store.

Sure the iPad starts at $499 and the Kindle starts at $259 and the “E Ink” display is nicer to use outside, but I think a lot of people will consider the extra $240 well spent to get all the extra features of the iPad. When you consider that the iPad offers a full-color LCD screen that can also support video embedded in the iBooks app, I think the iPad will be the biggest e-reader device yet. It will just appeal to a wider audience. The Amazon Kindle is dead.

I am looking forward to curling up with one of these to see what the experience is like. I wonder if the Apple Store will stock the Maxell Blown Away chair that Steve was using on stage to go with it as an accessory?

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Our old 700 MHz iBook G3 passed away quietly on Saturday evening. My wife had used it to check her email that morning, and all had seemed well, but when she tried to wake it for a late-night check just before retiring, it refused to respond.

Over the next several hours I tried every method of resuscitation I could think of, plus some more than I looked up on the Internet, but no joy. The screen remained black; No start-up chime; no hard drive sound; indeed no sign of life at all other than a hum (normal) from the power manager when the AC adapter was plugged in. I tried the reset sequence for this model (Control + Option + Shift + Power) several times, also reset the PRAM, tried removing the battery and unplugging the power adapter and letting the machine sit for several hours, and eventually overnight. Nada.

Perhaps a motherboard failure. I’m doubtful that the problem is the hard drive, since the screen remains dead. Evidently, this sort of failure is not unheard of, or even terribly uncommon with the G3 iBook, which was not one of Apple’s better efforts in terms of OS reliability, and this one being past its sixth anniversary in service was probably overdue, although up to now it had been a trouble-free machine.

I bought the iBook — the first iteration of the “opaque white” dual USB model, on the last day of 2002, just under the wire for a tax deduction on that year. I was very happy with it. I loved the look and size, interestingly quite similar in the squared-off lines and footprint dimensions to my first Apple laptop, a PowerBook 5300, although much thinner and lighter in weight. I also loved the bright, razor-sharp 12.1-inch display with its tight pixel density (for the time).

On the other hand, I’ve never much cared for the keyboard or trackpad — the former having a cheap and clunky feel, and the latter being exceptionally “jumpy” and hypersensitive. Neither was a problem for this iBook’s primary role during the first three years of my ownership, during which it served me faithfully and well as my production workhorse, sitting on a laptop stand and connected to an external keyboard and mouse.

This was a basic, $999 entry-level iBook with a plain-vanilla, drawer-loading CD-ROM drive and a smallish 20 gigabyte IBM hard drive, and it remained essentially stock (not that there’s a whole lot you can do to upgrade or expand an iBook anyway) throughout my ownership except for being maxed out with 640MB of RAM (not enough toward the end of its workhorse days).

The computer, which originally shipped with Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar,” was progressively upgraded through OS 10.3 and then 10.4, and finished its days running OS 10.4.11, which it did very comfortably. With only 16MB of video RAM and an ATI RADEON 7500 GPU, it just barely supported the more advanced Quartz Extreme and Core Image graphics technologies in OS 10.3 and later.

The only real functional issues I had with it were some modem problems and USB crankiness (that caused a few kernel panics) with OS 10.2 the early revisions of OS 10.3, but that disappeared with the later Panther builds and with OS 10.4. I did outgrow the capacity of the 20GB hard drive before I moved on, but the little IBM drive was reliable, and remained whisper-quiet throughout the iBook’s six-year plus lifespan.

I replaced it as my a No. 1 production Mac in February 2006, with an Apple Certified Refurbished 17-inch PowerBook, which has proved a superb performer, and the iBook was demoted to serving as my “road” laptop for a year and a half. It was compact and relatively light to lug around, but as previously mentioned, I wasn’t a fan of the keyboard and trackpad, and I eventually replaced it as my mobile machine with a hotrodded G4 Pismo PowerBook.

I’m sorry to see the iBook go, but it died with its boots on, so to speak, still in the harness when it expired from what appears to have been a major internal organ failure. It was a likable computer, will be remembered fondly, and if my new unibody MacBook serves me as well, I’ll be more than satisfied.

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“iScroll2 is a modified trackpad driver that adds two-finger scrolling capabilities to supported pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks on OS X 10.3 and up. Supported models include most aluminum PowerBooks introduced from 2003 to 2004 as well as most G4 iBooks.”

Download iScroll 2 here,and install. After the install and a quick restart iScroll 2 will be an option in your system preferences.

I found that the default settings were way too sensitive, and I couldn’t easily scroll with them. I used the settings like the ones pictured below and they worked well, but I would suggest taking a few minutes to tweak them.

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