The flaws in Apple's plan to reinvent textbooks become apparent when you see Inkling's
From Inkling
One of the things the tech press missed last month when Apple (AAPL) summoned them -- satellite trucks and all -- to Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum for the unveiling of its new textbook authoring tools, is that Inkling got there first.
Launched two years ago by a former Apple educational marketing manager named Matt MacInnis, Inkling had already published more than 100 electronic textbooks for the iPad in the time it took Apple to make eight.
And on Tuesday, with a good deal less hoopla than Apple was able to generate, MacInnis unveiled a second generation e-book publishing tool, Inkling Habitat, that has even more interactive bells and whistles than Apple's iBook 2 -- guided tours, 3-D exhibits, quizzes, high definition video, etc. -- but is designed to streamline the workflow of industrial-strength textbook publishers. Among the features touted in its press release: (I quote)
MacInnis unveiling Inking Habitat at O'Reilly's TOC Tuesday
Cross-platform with a click. Click "Publish", and Inkling Habitat pushes updates to every target platform at once, automatically customizing layouts for each device.
According to MacInnis, the eight titles Apple unveiled in January were painstakingly hand-crafted one worker at a time. Inkling's platform is made to accommodate the large teams of designers and editors -- often scattered across the globe -- that major publishers assign to a textbook project.
"To reinvent the book," he says, sounding very much like an Apple marketing manager. "We had to reinvent the printing press."
Whether Inkling can compete in the e-textbook market with Apple -- which makes the hardware, the software and the distribution system -- remains to be seen. But it's got a head start.
An impressive start, but how many of those 350,000 downloads were freebies?
Image: Apple.com
Apple (AAPL) certainly got the attention of educators and the educational publishing community with the iPad textbook initiative it announced last Thursday. And no wonder. It's been a long time since anybody lavished that kind of attention and glitz on what has traditionally been an unglamorous -- albeit highly profitable -- corner of the book industry.
The first MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Jan 23, 2012 3:08 PM ET
The book industry thinks its digital transformation is happening even faster than it did with music and movies.
Barnes & Noble believes one of these formats will soon be obsolete
At the GigaOm Big Data conference in New York City this week, Barnes & Noble (BKS) executive Marc Parrish took the stage to discuss rapid changes in the book publishing industry.
"The book business is changing more radically now, and quicker, than MORE
JP Mangalindan, Writer-Reporter - Mar 25, 2011 1:31 PM ET
Google's model of making a few bucks per article may make the most sense in the long run.
Focus Online, the third largest German publisher, is Beta-testing Google's (GOOG) publishing system, according to the Guardian. The One Pass system is a web-based tool for publishers who want to charge micro-payments for content rather than use a subscription service. Each piece of content is paid for through Google's Checkout system and for the trouble, MORE
Seth Weintraub - Feb 22, 2011 12:40 PM ET
The subscription model Apple announced today is unlikely to please anyone
Image: News Corp.
There was a rumor in the Time Life building last week that Apple (AAPL) -- which had been in a stand-off with the publishing industry for nearly a year -- had "blinked" and was about to cut a deal favorable to the publishers.
It was not to be. When Apple announced its new App Store subscription service MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 15, 2011 10:28 AM ET
by John Patrick Pullen, contributor
If students embrace textbooks on the iPad, college bookstores may lose their shirts.
It may be the season for graduation parties and commencement speeches, but colleges and universities are already prepping for next year, even in the bookstore. Next fall, during opening weekend, students will once again file into university bookstores to purchase course materials, school supplies, and a college sweatshirt or two.
While the university licensed MORE
May 17, 2010 3:00 AM ET
Production is starting and should hit mass-market stride in February, says an analyst
Artist's rendition of an Apple tablet computer, with iPhone. Credit: AppleInsider
"The manufacturing cogs for the tablet are creaking into action," writes Oppenheimer's Yair Reiner in a note to clients issued Wednesday morning.
According to his supply chain sources, Apple (AAPL) appears to be gearing up to build as many as 1 million tablet computers per month. Assuming the MORE
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