Mail Pilot  →

Here’s an interesting project on Kickstarter. Josh Milas and Alex Obenauer are seeking to re-imagine email by developing an email program that’s melded with a to-do app. The premiss is that the vast majority of your incoming emails are actionable in some way, shape, or form.

Mail Pilot

iClassroom  →

Will Kujawa, a student at Oklahoma State:

In a few years Apple could dominate the [college] classroom similar to how Microsoft dominates enterprise.

Will also talks about how the majority of Apple products in his college classrooms are MacBooks, not iPads. That makes sense because for a student who needs a computer to take notes, do research, and complete papers and other projects, an iPad is not a replacement for a laptop or desktop computer.

A computer has been the standard college-student gadget for decades. It used to be desktops, now it’s laptops, and Apple wants it to become iPads.

Apple wants the iPad to be seen as a computer replacement. And so I can’t help but wonder if positioning the iPad as a replacement for textbooks is also a subtle way to slowly introduce iPads as replacements for laptops.

It’s like a twist to the Halo Effect — instead of an iPod leading to a MacBook purchase, buying an iPad for casual usage leads to keeping the iPad for more serious usage. It’s already happening in the professional sphere (examples: I, II, III).

As Stephen Hackett said, last week’s announcements had Steve Jobs’ fingerprints all over them.

iClassroom

The Good and Bad of Apple’s Education Announcements  →

Fraser Speirs gives a good overview of the good and bad regarding the new iBooks textbooks, iBooks Author, and iTunes U:

Apple already revolutionized education when it invented the iPad. While iBooks textbooks are a bridge from the past to the future—and we do need a way to get to the future—they are not that future. If Henry Ford had been an educational publisher, his customers would have asked for electronic textbooks instead of faster horses.

The Good and Bad of Apple’s Education Announcements

Why iBooks Author is a Big Deal  →

Michael E. Cohen:

Having access to good instructional resources is always better for students and for teachers than not having such access. And although interactive multimedia textbooks of the type that iBooks Author makes so very easy to prepare and to publish probably won’t make a bad teacher into a good one or a poor student into a candidate for valedictorian, it is much better to have them available for teachers and for students than not.

Why iBooks Author is a Big Deal

iBooks Author for Authors  →

Matt Gemmell gives a high-level look at what you’re getting into if you decide to publish a work via the iBooks Author app.

I’ve spent a the majority of my afternoon working in iBooks Author, and it is very simple to use. If you are wanting to ship a book that does not require this deep functionality then it would not be too much more work to release your book as an eBook, a PDF, and an iBooks book (or whatever the proper term is for a work that’s been built within iBooks Author).

iBooks Author for Authors

An SDK for Writers

There are four primary components to publishing a book:

  1. Writing and Editing: The first and most important component to publishing a book is the actual writing of it followed by the editing of that writing.

  2. Distribution: How will you sell it and distribute it?

  3. Medium: Will it be a PDF, an eBook, a physical book, or any combination? And now there is a new medium: an iBooks book. This is more akin to book-app combos such as Our Choice by Al Gore and Push Pop Press.

Our Choice is a deeply interactive book that shipped as a standalone iPad app. However, version 2 of iBooks now supports books like this natively. If you want to make a powerful, interactive, unique-looking book you can do so via Apple’s new tools, and then you can ship and sell them as books, not apps.

  1. Design / Layout: Until today, if you wanted a book that worked like Our Choice then you needed to hire an iOS developer to build your book in Xcode. If you were designing a PDF or eBook you could do it in Microsoft Word or Pages, or for more control of the design you could use Adobe InDesign. The cost of these tools ranges from $19 (for Pages), to hundreds of dollars (for InDesign), to thousands of dollars (to hire iOS devs).

But now, if you want to make an attractive and interactive eBook you don’t have to hire an iOS developer to build you a dedicated app. If you are even remotely familiar with Pages then you’ll be able to take what you’ve written and turn it into a good looking and interactive book for the iPad and then distribute it on the iBookstore to an audience of millions of iPad owners who can buy it and download it with one tap.

In short, the iBooks Author app is a huge breakthrough for the independent writer and publisher. In this author’s humble opinion, this new and free app from Apple was the primary announcement of Apple’s education event today.

iBooks Author is the iPad SDK for writers and publishers. And it’s been simplified so it’s as easy to use as a word processor.

An SDK for Writers