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Apple wins trademark case over ‘iBooks’

Jeff John Roberts — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:15:53 +0000

A small New York publisher that uses the label “ibooks” has struck out in its lawsuit against Apple, after a New York court on Wednesday held that the publisher’s mark was not distinct and that consumers would not confuse the two companies’ products.

The case began in 2011 after Black Tower Press, a publisher of sci-fi and fantasy titles, filed a trademark suit in response to Apple’s announcement that it would use the word “iBooks” to describe software that allows users to purchase online books. Here’s a look at the two marks:

Black Tower came into possession of the “ibooks” mark in 2006 by purchasing the assets of another publishing company that had used the word for an imprint that sold millions of sci-fi and horror books in the early 2000′s. Neither Black Tower nor its predecessor, however, obtained a registered trademark for the word.

Apple, on the other hand, did obtain registered trademark rights. It first obtained a license to use “iBook” from another software company in 1999 to describe a line of colorful computers; in 2010, Apple bought the other company’s trademark entirely.

In a detailed decision, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote explained that the word “ibooks” was simply descriptive of books sold on the internet, and that Black Tower had not acquired any distinctive meaning in the word — only in the word and lightbulb logo used together.

Cote also wrote that she was granting summary judgment to Apple for a second reason: that no consumers would be confused by the two companies’ products:

They have offered no evidence that consumers who use Apple’s iBooks software to download ebooks have come to believe that Apple has also entered the publishing business and is the publisher of all of the downloaded books, despite the fact that each book bears the imprint of its actual publisher.

You can read a copy of the decision, spotted by Law360 (sub req’d), below with important parts highlighted. (Publishing insiders — check out the judge’s skewering at pages 31-35 of the expert testimony of industry veteran, Michael Shatzkin).

iBooks

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Updated: Apple expands iBookstore in Japan with new publisher partnerships

Erica Ogg — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:04:05 +0000

A small update to iBooks on Tuesday has some pretty big implications for Apple customers in Japan: with iBooks 3.1 they can now purchase ebooks rather than just download free or public domain content.

The move was foreshadowed earlier this year. Both The Nikkei in Japan and AllThingsD reported in early January that Apple had signed distribution deals with three big Japanese publishers.

In a press release sent out on Tuesday evening Eastern time, Apple notes that the Japanese iBookstore features “titles from major and independent publishers, including a great selection of books from Kodansha, KADOKAWA, Bungeishunju, Gakken and Gentosha. The iBookstore has a wide selection of emerging and established authors including Shyotaro Ikenami, Jiro Akagawa, Atsuko Asano and Ryu Murakami.”

The Japanese iBookstore is also offering enhanced ebooks and “digitally exclusive titles including Ryu Murakami’s fiction novels ‘At the Airport,’ ‘Exodus of Middle-School Students’ and ‘I’ll Always Be With You, Always’ which has interactive emails in each chapter to bring you even deeper into the story.”

The update notes for 3.1 say, “The iBookstore in Japan now has hundreds of thousands of books available for purchase, including fiction, manga, light novels and more.” In addition, the update says there are reading improvements for “a number of Asian languages,” though the specific languages are not specified.

The iBooks update is out now and can be downloaded via the App Store.

This post was updated at 8:17 p.m. ET on Tuesday, March 5 with additional details from Apple’s press release about the iBookstore’s launch.

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iTunes launches Breakout Books section to highlight self-published titles

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:18:08 +0000

Amazon intensely promotes self-published Kindle books, and now Apple is taking steps toward doing the same thing. The company has launched a new section of the iBookstore, “Breakout Books,” a “hand-picked collection of books from emerging talents…independently published to the iBookstore.” New books will be added “as they begin taking off.”

Apple had previously launched Breakout Books sections in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.K. The section focuses primarily on genre fiction, with sections for romance, sci-fi/fantasy, and mystery/thriller.

While Apple mentions “hand-picking,” the books in the section primarily seem to be chosen based on how well they are selling. In a very long blog post about the benefits of self-publishing, Mark Coker, the founder of self-publishing company Smashwords, notes that 54 of the 64 titles in the Breakout Books section were distributed by Smashwords. He’d previously noted that Apple is now the largest retailer for Smashwords authors. (Smashwords does not distribute books to Kindle.)

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How to use your iPhone, iPad or Mac to borrow ebooks from the library

Geoffrey Goetz — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 17:00:47 +0000

You may be familiar with purchasing books and magazines for your iPhone and iPad, but have you ever borrowed an ebook or digital edition of a magazine from your local library? As more and more local libraries are adding online digital catalogs of books for borrowing, it’s a great — and cheaper! — way of building up your digital library for free. After trying out a few methods for using the resources of your local library to borrow electronic versions of your favorite ebooks, magazines and audiobooks, I’ve written up a quick guide to follow.

Borrowing ebooks with OverDrive

Most libraries are choosing a third party to host and manage the lending process. One such service provider, OverDrive Digital Downloads, is what my local library uses. OverDrive currently supports 18,000 libraries with millions of readers. The experience is not quite what you would expect if you’re used to Apple’s integrated iBooks app or Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. But it does work, and once you have the ebook on your iPhone or iPad, the reading experience is just about the same.

Getting Started: The first thing you will need is an active account at your local library. This will be used to identify you as a borrower and ultimately limit the number of ebooks you can have checked out at any one time.

Selecting an e-reader: For most of the titles available from my local library on OverDrive, I have only two main choices: to either use Amazon’s Kindle solution on my iPhone, iPad and Mac, or to use OverDrive’s own e-reader client for the iPhone, iPad and Mac. As a possible third option, you can also elect to use Adobe Digital Editions for the Mac. But be aware: the one client that you will not be able to use is Apple’s own iBook e-reader for iOS, as it does not support the DRM solution that the other readers support.

Borrowing an ebook: Browsing the online library of ebooks is the same experience for all e-eaders. You will select a book via your browser. I found that using Safari for OS X and iOS work just fine for this. Once you associate your library account with OverDrive, you can create wish lists and place holds on books you want to read. Each title in the library is limited to a predetermined number of copies that the library can lend out.

Downloading the ebook: If you place a hold on a book, you will be notified via email when the book is available. Depending on your e-reader, once you log in to your library account, you will either download the file directly to the OverDrive e-reader client on your device, or you will log on and register your library account with Amazon, and check the book out directly to your Amazon account.

Since I already have all of my devices registered with my Amazon Kindle account, as soon as I checked out the ebook it was available on all of my devices for me to read. So reading any ebook that I check out from the library is the same experience on my Kindle as with any other book in my library. Even my bookmarks sync across all of my devices.

Digital magazines with Zinio

The experience with magazines is different since my library chose to go with Zinio as its partner. Zinio has been around for a while and was bringing digital versions of popular magazines to your iPhone and iPad long before Apple introduced iOS Newsstand to the world. There are no choices here, you have to use the Zinio reader for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.

You do have to sync your Zinio account with your library account, but once that is done, as soon as you select a magazine from the online library of digital magazines available for lending, it instantly shows up on your Zinio account for reading. While you won’t have the same connivence as you would with a receiving updates via a paid subscription, selecting individual releases can be more cost effective since borrowing is of course free.

Borrowing audiobooks

I was also happy to see that you can use OverDrive to check out audiobooks from the library as well. To do this, you will have to use the OverDrive client for Mac, which does come with some restrictions: You will not be able to borrow any audiobook that in only available in WMV format. You will be limited to borrowing only MP3 audiobooks.

You will be able to listen to your audiobooks in your favorite audio device as the OverDrive client for Mac supports exporting audiobooks to devices like an iPhone, iPad and iPod. You are even permitted to use the OverDrive client to burn an audiobook to CD.

Overall the experience was a positive one. It takes a little to get used to the process of searching for electronic books and magazines that will work with the format your e-reader supports, and ultimately to get them working on your preferred devices. But after you have done it a couple of times, it’s really not all that complicated. And it can definitely help expand your reading list and your own personal digital library without costing you anything.

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Apple will sell ebooks in Japan

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:00:53 +0000

Apple will launch a fully fledged iBookstore in Japan this year, Japanese newspaper The Nikkei reports [paywall, only a snippet is free]. While iBooks has been available there since 2010, Apple and other e-reading companies faced reluctant publishers. Now, with Kindle , Kobo, Google and Sony all selling ebooks in Japan, Apple reportedly has agreements with Japanese publishers Shogakukan, Kodansha and Kadokawa.

The timing of the launch is unclear. While The Nikkei says it could happen as early as this month, AllThingsD cites sources who say that’s “far too optimistic.”

Japan has been slow to embrace ebooks, with manga dominating the ebook market and publishers reluctant to digitize books in fear of cannibalization of print sales. (Publishing Perspectives has a lot of good coverage of the ebook transition in Japan.) But the arrival of other Western ebook retailers in the country should grease the wheels for Apple, and since the iPad’s market share in Japan is estimated around 60 percent, that should also help adoption of the platform.

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Review: iBooks 3′s new scrolling view, collections, sharing

Mark Crump — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 20:12:14 +0000

As part of its Mac and iPad mini event on Tuesday, Apple also unveiled iBooks 3. It’s free, and it’s the first significant update to the ebook software since January. The big new features include a new scrolling view, a Collection to easily view books you’ve purchased (as opposed to side-loaded), and better way to share passages of books via social networks. I’m going to take you through each of the new features, and give you my thoughts on them.

Scrolling view

You can access the new scrolling view by tapping on the “aA” icon in the upper-right corner, choosing Themes, and then tapping on Scroll. Now, instead of tapping on the screen edges to turn the page, you can just scroll up to keep reading. If you use Instapaper at all, it works just like reading in that app.

The chief problem I have with this view is it felt like I was reading a run-on page. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but my eyes and brain are used to the brief rest that comes with turning the page. Simply put, I did feel myself freaking out a bit when the page went on way longer than I expected. My initial experience was so displeasing that after vowing to give it a solid chance, I just gave up. There are location numbers in the left-hand margin so you can get a vague sense of when page numbers change, but I would like it better if there was also a thin horizontal rule to mark the location changes.

I don’t think the new view is completely useless, though. An ideal use would be reference texts where you need to view a section of text than spans over two pages. For general reading, however, I still find the tap-to-turn method the best. Also, while Apple has said it’s tweaked iOS to detect accidental thumb pressed with the iPad mini, the scrolling text view could be a guaranteed way to make sure you don’t suddenly jump ahead 20 pages.

Purchased Collection

I don’t buy a lot of books via iBooks — Amazon, for the time being, is still my chosen purveyor of reading materials — but recently I needed to look at a book I’d bought through the iBookstore previously. To read it, I needed to go the iBookstore, choose Purchased, and then redownload it from there. It felt like a few steps too many.

I know, I know. I suffered.

One thing Amazon’s Kindle app has done better than iBooks is how it handles books in the cloud. You just click on the Cloud tab and you view a library on non-downloaded books. Now, iBooks works the same way. Go to your Collections list, choose Purchased, and boom, your Books in the Cloud are there.

Unfortunately, one area Amazon still eats Apple’s lunch is how it handles sideloaded content. You can upload damn near anything to your Personal Documents section on Amazon and download it to your various Kindle apps. Apple only supports this feature for books you buy through the iBookstore. If you sideload a lot of content to iBooks (guilty) you still need to use iTunes to sync it to your iOS devices.

Now, that’s suffering.

Sharing passages

Every now and then, I tweet a book I’m reading (or just finished reading). Maybe it’s the bibliophile’s version of sharing what I ate for lunch. How I’d expect a sharing feature to work in a books app is to tweet, Facebook, or whatever, a book I’m reading, some general thoughts, and a shortened link to the book in the retailer’s store.

That’s not how it works in iBooks.

Instead, you highlight a passage, tap Share, and that passage along with your commentary are shared. I rubbed my temples at the various types of passages that may be shared with me on Twitter and Facebook since I have friend with odd tastes in reading.

As with the scrolling text, I’m going to say this feature is the most relevant to people reading texts that need to share passages with others via email. When I was in school, I’d need to share parts of scientific texts with group mates. Schools, book clubs, religious study groups, etc. could find this handy for sharing amongst themselves.

Afterward

I’d put a side bet with myself that we’d see an iBooks update on Tuesday. What with the rumor mill and all, I felt it was easy money. It’s a good thing there wasn’t a point spread, though.

Because while testing these new features out, my thoughts kept tracking along the lines of: this is a full version release? It felt like it should have been called iBooks 2.5; not iBooks 3. Maybe there’s more coming in future dot releases, especially once iTunes 11 is released.

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Apple releases iBooks 3, expands to more countries

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 17:56:22 +0000

At Tuesday’s iPad mini event in San Francisco, Apple announced an update to iBooks, its ebook reading platform. The company is also reportedly expanding the iBookstore to 18 more countries in Latin America, including Brazil, as well as New Zealand. That makes the iBookstore available in a total of 50 countries.

Overall, the iBookstore contains 1.5 million books that have been downloaded 400 million times so far, Apple CEO Tim Cook said. The main changes to iBooks — which isn’t updated in the iTunes Store as of this writing, but will be today — are a continuous scrolling option for ebooks (so you can just flick instead of turning virtual pages — a feature readers may or may not care about) and better integration with iCloud so that ebooks sync across devices. You can tap to share a passage on Facebook or Twitter. The company also added support for Korean, Chinese and Japanese, bringing the total number of languages supported to over 40, according to Cook.

In addition, Apple’s self-publishing platform iBooks Author, which lets users create graphics-rich ebooks (like textbooks) for iPad, is being updated. It gets new templates, the option to create portrait-only (as opposed to landscape) books and other customization options.

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Hiptype wants to be the Google Analytics for ebooks

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 16:00:23 +0000

Retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble are already collecting data about how users are consuming ebooks on their platforms — but the book publishers themselves have no access to that retailer data, and they often have no idea who’s reading their ebooks or how readers are consuming them. The founders of Hiptype, a startup in Y Combinator’s spring 2012 class, hope to solve that problem with a plugin that provides publishers with detailed data about how people are reading their ebooks.

Once Hiptype’s plugin is added to an ebook, it provides insights like reader demographics, reading behavior (where people start or stop reading; what they skip), conversion patterns (who buys an ebook after reading a free sample); and sharing and highlighting behavior (which passages readers highlight or take notes on). Publishers then log into their Hiptype accounts to see a dashboard with visualizations of the data. Hiptype also helps publishers run Facebook campaigns and target readers with personalized recommendations.

Hiptype launches in beta this week and is working with a limited number of publishers, whom 26-year-old founder and CEO James Levy (cofounder is 19-year-old Sohail Prasad) would not name — though a sample book profile for 50 Shades of Grey suggests Random House might be one early client. Other publishers — as well as self-published authors — can request access on Hiptype’s website and will be invited to join in waves. The first book is free. After that, Hiptype will charge $19 per month per book for a basic package (including data from up to 1,000 readers and basic insights and trends) or $99 per month per book for a pro package (including data from up to 500,000 readers, detailed insights and trends, ad management and personalized backlist recommendations for readers).

One possible concern is privacy. “We don’t want to discourage the conversation about privacy,” Levy said, noting that while all of the data Hiptype collects is anonymous, users can opt out completely. The company is also looking for ways it can improve its service for readers. In beta, end users have requested that Hiptype make its data available to them. For example, Levy said, a teacher could track how students are interacting with the books they’ve been assigned to read.

It doesn’t work everywhere yet

Hiptype’s largest limitation is that it doesn’t work on every platform. The plugin only works on platforms that support HTML5 and allow Javascript to be embedded within a book. Apple, which supports EPUB3 and HTML5, is in. But e-ink devices, like Kindle and Nook e-readers, web-based readers like Kindle Cloud, and desktop e-reading platforms are out.

Apple is estimated to have about 10 percent of the ebook market, with Kindle at 55 to 60 percent and Nook around 25 percent. In the case of Kindle and Nook, we don’t know how much of their usage comes from devices versus mobile apps, but for now Hiptype is missing a large portion of the ebook market.

Levy says Hiptype works on most iOS and Android e-reading apps, but wouldn’t clarify what those are beyond “some of the most popular e-reader apps on the most popular operating systems.” He says Hiptype is in discussions with ebook retailers and it’s “paramount to our success that we have an open line of communication.”

When publishers do see the data on their books, “it can be a little bit depressing,” Levy said. Publishers testing Hiptype in beta, for instance, were surprised by “how low conversion rates are” — early data suggests that only three to four percent of people who download a free ebook sample go on to buy the book — and how few people who do buy a book finish reading it. “It can be a bit of a bummer,” Levy said. “But as soon as you start measuring, you can do tests and see what moves the needle. We’re already doing research on the data we’re collecting. As data hackers, we think there are underlying patterns here even if they’re not apparent at first.”

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Where Apple spends its money in Washington, plus 4 other Apple stories to read today

Erica Ogg — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 17:51:47 +0000

With so many people writing about Apple, finding the best stories and reports isn’t easy. Here’s our daily pick of stories about the company from around the Web that you shouldn’t miss:

Apple was once again outspent by Google in lobbying our nation’s policymakers. Still, as Fortune points out, it’s interesting to see which causes Apple cares about most: patents, copyright law, batteries, and more.
CEO Tim Cook is an efficiency expert. And The Wall Street Journal has a piece today exemplifying what he brings to Apple: the company gets paid for its products faster than it pays to make them.
The loophole that allowed an in-app purchase hack for iOS apps has been closed by Apple. And Alexey Borodin, the Russian developer behind the hack, admits he’s been defeated, according to ZDNet.
Reuters says it has confirmed what has been rumored for months: that Apple is set to change up the docking connector on the next iPhone.
Cult of Mac looks at the choices consumers face when they want to buy ebooks and how Apple’s iBooks can present a particular dilemma for buyers.

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Hands on: Retina-enabled reading apps for iPad

Mark Crump — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:00:03 +0000

As a voracious reader, the main appeal of the high-resolution Retina display of the new iPad is the improved text viewing, with the enhanced graphics as a secondary, but welcome, improvement. In theory, any app that uses Apple’s built-in text rendering API will render fine on a Retina display. The problem with the reading apps is that few of them use that API. Instead, apps like the Kindle and Nook apps use their own rendering mechanism. Fortunately, the Amazon app has been upgraded to take advantage of the new display — unfortunately, the Nook app hasn’t. Below I detail my experiences with the major reader apps that are now Retina-capable: the Kindle app, iBooks, Comixology and Zinio.

iBooks

Apple’s iBooks app was my default reading platform until I got a Kindle device. Amazon’s selection, Whispernet technology, and the ability to read my books on just about any device I owned moved me to that platform. Now iBooks uses your iTunes account to sync notes and reading position, and the selection for new releases seems to match Amazon’s new releases. What I had forgotten was just how good books in iBooks look. When reading the sample chapter of Michael Connelly’s The Drop via iBooks I noticed the typography overall was crisper and the design markedly different from the Kindle app. Even side-loaded books looked better, probably due to different fonts in the iBooks app.

I also noticed an improvement in the rendering of PDFs compared to the original iPad. Assuming the PDF is of a high-enough resolution, the text and photos will be much clearer on the new iPad thanks to the display. The one thing I’ve always enjoyed about the iBooks app is how well it manages ePub and PDF files.

The problem I’ve noticed with iBooks, however, is it seems to take a very long time to open — about 13 seconds. I’m not sure if it’s because of the size of my library or just the app itself.

Amazon Kindle app

While the iBooks app looks better, the Kindle app still looks great on the Retina display. Even if you’ve blown the text up to the largest font size available, the text is very clear with no discernible anti-aliasing. The latest version of the app has an interface that is similar to the Kindle Fire app with tabs along the top for Books, Newsstand and Personal Documents. As an aside, I’ve always enjoyed how seamless Amazon’s Personal Documents makes reading side-loaded books. I hope someday Apple will let iBooks readers store side-loaded ePubs in iCloud.

While I was previously critical of how Newsstand items rendered in the Kindle app, I did notice a very slight improvement with the new iPad. The text is still slightly too heavy for my tastes and it varies from magazine to magazine. The pages do load smoothly, however, and I did not detect any focusing issues.

Zinio

Zinio has the toughest load to bear with the Retina display. Delivering quality text on a Retina display, even if you use your own API, isn’t that taxing — displaying 50-plus pages that are graphics is, however. Therefore, it didn’t surprise me that Zinio had the worst growing pains. The version of the app available when the new iPad launched had issues where the pages would slowly load as tiles. The first release of the updated app showed a marginal improvement. The app that is now available (version 2.2.2 — check your updates, it launched almost immediately after 2.2.1) is a big improvement. The only time I notice the tiling effect is if the magazine is still being downloaded. While the focusing still isn’t instantaneous, it’s not any worse than usual.

I’m a guitar player, so the litmus test for me is how easily I can read the tablature in a magazine. On the iPad 2, I still had to zoom in to make out the small numbers. On the new iPad, it’s much clearer minimizing the need to zoom in. I have also noticed an improved sharpness in my photography magazines, especially with National Geographic.

Comixology

The iPad really got me back into reading comics, and Comixology quickly became my go-to source for digital comics. The new iPad really makes this a fantastic reading experience. With older iPads, the text would be fuzzy enough to force me to use the pane-by-pane view. With the new iPad, I don’t need to. While the issues look great as they are, Comixology is stepping up their game by updating (for free) most of their library to what they call CMX HD. At the time of publishing, roughly 1,000 titles have been upgraded. When you are shopping for comics it will say CMX HD in the lower right hand corner of the page if it is available in HD. This was the app I was most looking forward to on the new iPad, and it has not disappointed me at all.

Newsstand

This is somewhat of a mess. Updating apps for the Retina displays really drives home for me how discombobulated the entire Newsstand experience is. At the time of publishing, few Newsstand apps from my library have been updated. Non-updated Newsstand apps have a noticeable focusing issue where the page takes several seconds to load, and it focuses in annoying tiles.

Overall, I’m very pleased with most of these apps, especially iBooks and Comixology, and how they’ve adapted to the new display on the iPad. I’m hopeful that having to deal with delivering large files will change how Zinio and Newsstand issues are delivered, ideally by using the text APIs to make the text even clearer and the files smaller.

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