Group items tagged

The iPad could give rise to a new creative self-publishing crowd that could, in turn, become competition for the established publishing industry.

A funny thing happened once the actual SDK was released to the broader development community: small houses and individual programmers delivered the first round of best selling games before the big companies got their products to market.

I suspect the first group to really embrace this will be educators who have created course material that includes audio and video, along with standard text. Authors of how-to books may also embrace video to enhance the learning process. Better yet, authors can take advantage of Apple's distribution power by making each book an app that can be sold through the iBookstore. By doing this, authors bypass publishers altogether.

But the more book publishers, more magazine publishers, more newspapers, the more video game creators, and textbook companies Apple can pull on board, the more attractive the iPad will become as a one-stop shop for media.

There’s more to a gadget than just good hardware. An elegantly designed user interface can put a gadget head and shoulders above its peers. That’s where most e-readers have fallen short. E-reader manufacturers’ focus on hardware design means their user interfaces often feel like an afterthought.

Another way to enhance the experience may be through opening up e-readers to third-party apps, as Amazon has done with the Kindle. That could bring additional features to the devices and maybe even alternate readers with more elegant interfaces.

The iPad might face similar hurdles. Thanks to its multiple functionality (not to be confused with multitasking), it will no doubt be popular as an entertainment device for surfing the web, playing games and listening to music, but from an educational standpoint, these functions might serve to distract students from their scholastic pursuits. Furthermore, while some might view the iPad’s touch screen as an advantage, when trying to take notes, it might prove unwieldy.

Some publishers have touted digital readership as a way forward for the magazine industry as advertisers warm up to iPad editions. The 58 magazine iPad editions tracked by the Publishers Information Bureau posted a 24.5% gain in ad units through June. Still, tablet circulation has not increased as rapidly as publishers had hoped.

Magazines apps are still too big for iPads because of all the images. Each iPad magazine takes up way too much storage, and people get turned off by the iPad magazines because of that. This is a problem specific to magazines because of all the imagery, especially for ads. Books don't have this problem, since they don't need ads. The situation reminds me of early tiny MP3 players before the iPod came out with its hard drive that could store your whole MP3 collection. Magazines on iPads will start to happen once you can store a hundred or thousand issues on them at once.

Issuu is the leading digital publishing platform delivering exceptional reading experiences of magazines, books, catalogs, reports, and more. In just a few seconds users can create beautiful digital editions simply by uploading their publications.

In addition to being the first Pulitzer for online-only work, it is the first awarded solely for animated video, as opposed to traditional cartoon strips or panels. Mr. Fiore is also the first self-syndicated editorial cartoonist to win the prize.

Cases like Mr. Fiore’s have raised questions about Apple’s policies toward apps with news content; Ryan Chittum, a writer for cjr.org, the Columbia Journalism Review Web site, asserted on Thursday that news media groups should withdraw their new iPad applications “unless Apple cedes complete control over the right to publish.”

“Sure, mine might get approved, but what about someone who hasn’t won a Pulitzer and who is maybe making a better political app than mine?” he asked. “Do you need some media frenzy to get an app approved that has political material?”

The swoops and rhythms of ancient typography have been all but lost in an age of modern digital fonts and utilitarian book design. But Scott-Martin Kosofsky and Matthew Carter have produced an astonishing corrective, in the form a fresh new type mined from the pages of a 16-century Hebrew tome.