IBooks
Encyclopedia
iBooks is an e-book
E-book
An electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...

 application by Apple Inc. It was announced in conjunction with the iPad
IPad
The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc., primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. The iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010 by Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs. Its size and...

 on January 27, 2010, and was released for the iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

 and iPod Touch
IPod Touch
The iPod Touch is a portable media player, personal digital assistant, handheld game console, and Wi-Fi mobile device designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPod Touch adds the multi-touch graphical user interface to the iPod line...

 in mid-2010, as part of the iOS 4 update. At that time, it was described by Apple as being available only in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. Product information released in March 2010 continued to indicate that iBooks would only be available in the U.S.

It primarily receives ePub
EPUB
EPUB is a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum...

 content from the iBookstore, but users can also add their own ePub and PDF files via data synchronization
Data synchronization
Data synchronization is the process of establishing consistency among data from a source to a target data storage and vice versa and the continuous harmonization of the data over time. It is fundamental to a wide variety of applications, including file synchronization and mobile device...

 with iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....

. Additionally, they can be downloaded to iBooks through Safari
Safari (web browser)
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the...

 or Apple Mail. It is also capable of displaying e-books that incorporate multimedia. According to product information as of March 2010, iBooks will be able to "read the contents of any page [to the user]" using VoiceOver
VoiceOver
VoiceOver is a screen reader built into Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X, iOS and iPod operating systems. By using VoiceOver, the user can access their Macintosh or iOS device based on spoken descriptions and, in the case of the Mac, the keyboard. The feature is designed to increase accessibility for blind...

.

History

iBooks was announced alongside the iPad at a press conference in January 2010. The store itself, however, was released in America three days before the iPad with the introduction of iTunes 9.1. This was supposedly to prevent too much traffic on Apple's servers, as they have overloaded with past releases of the iPhone. On the day of its launch, on 31 March 2010, the iBook store collection comprised some 60,000 titles.

On April 8, 2010, Apple announced that iBooks would be updated to support the iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

 and iPod Touch
IPod Touch
The iPod Touch is a portable media player, personal digital assistant, handheld game console, and Wi-Fi mobile device designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPod Touch adds the multi-touch graphical user interface to the iPod line...

 with iOS 4. As a result, iBooks will not be supported on first-generation iPhones and iPod Touches.

On June 8, 2010 at the WWDC Keynote it was announced that iBooks would be updated that month to read PDF files as well as have the ability to annotate both PDFs and eBooks.

As of July 1, Apple expanded iBooks availability to Canada, but there's no word on future expansions.

Upon its release for older devices running iOS 4, such as the iPhone 3GS
IPhone 3GS
-Camera:The iPhone 3GS features an improved 3 megapixel camera manufactured by OmniVision. In addition to the higher megapixel count, it also features auto-focus, auto white balance and auto macro and is capable of capturing VGA video...

 and iPod Touch
IPod Touch
The iPod Touch is a portable media player, personal digital assistant, handheld game console, and Wi-Fi mobile device designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPod Touch adds the multi-touch graphical user interface to the iPod line...

, iBooks received criticism for its slow performance. However, a July 19 update from Apple offered several improvements.

On 27 September 2011, Apple expanded the premium store to the Republic of Ireland.

The US, UK, Canada, Australia and Ireland are some of the only countries that have premium iBookstore stores.

Features

Users of the application are able to change the font and text size displayed. Available fonts are Baskerville
Baskerville
Baskerville is a transitional serif typeface designed in 1757 by John Baskerville in Birmingham, England. Baskerville is classified as a transitional typeface, positioned between the old style typefaces of William Caslon, and the modern styles of Giambattista Bodoni and Firmin Didot.The...

, Cochin, Georgia
Georgia (typeface)
Georgia is a transitional serif typeface designed in 1993 by Matthew Carter and hinted by Tom Rickner for the Microsoft Corporation, as the serif companion to the first Microsoft sans serif screen font, Verdana. Microsoft released the initial version of the font on November 1, 1996 as part of the...

, Palatino
Palatino
Palatino is the name of a large typeface family that began as an old style serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf initially released in 1948 by the Linotype foundry.In 1999, Zapf revised Palatino for Linotype and Microsoft, called Palatino Linotype...

, Times New Roman, and Verdana
Verdana
Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typography group...

.

Users can adjust screen brightness from within the application, with greater range than available from the Settings app and the multitasking bar.

Words can be selected and searched throughout the book.

Pages are turned by tapping or dragging the page.

Each copy of iBooks comes with a free copy of Winnie-the-Pooh
Winnie-the-Pooh (book)
Winnie-the-Pooh is the first volume of stories about Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne. It is followed by The House at Pooh Corner. The book focuses on the adventures of a teddy bear called Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends Piglet, a small toy pig; Eeyore, a toy donkey; Owl, a live owl; and Rabbit, a...

, the 1926 book by A. A. Milne
A. A. Milne
Alan Alexander Milne was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various children's poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work.-Biography:A. A...

, in order to get the user's library started.

Formats

The supported e-book
E-book
An electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...

 formats by iBooks are ePub
EPUB
EPUB is a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum...

 and PDF
Portable Document Format
Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....

.

iBookstore

The iBookstore is an ePub
EPUB
EPUB is a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum...

 content sales and delivery system that delivers e-books to the iPad and to other devices running iOS 4.0 and 5.0 (namely the iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

 and the iPod touch
IPod touch
The iPod Touch is a portable media player, personal digital assistant, handheld game console, and Wi-Fi mobile device designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPod Touch adds the multi-touch graphical user interface to the iPod line...

). The iBooks shelf turns around, revealing the iBookstore. From here users can purchase various books from Apple. iBooks can sync between devices, so one could start reading a book on one device and continue from where one left off on another.

Prior to the unveiling of the iPad, publishers Penguin Books
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...

, HarperCollins
HarperCollins
HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...

, Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster, Inc., a division of CBS Corporation, is a publisher founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. It is one of the four largest English-language publishers, alongside Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins...

, Macmillan Publishers
Macmillan Publishers
Macmillan Publishers Ltd, also known as The Macmillan Group, is a privately held international publishing company owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It has offices in 41 countries worldwide and operates in more than thirty others.-History:...

, and Hachette Book Group USA
Hachette Book Group USA
Hachette Book Group is a publishing company owned by Hachette Livre, the largest publishing company in France, and the second largest publisher in the world. Hachette Livre is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lagardère Group. HBG was formed when Hachette Livre purchased the Time Warner Book Group from...

 committed to producing content for the iBookstore. Additional publishers were invited to participate on the day of the product announcement, January 27, 2010. The iBookstore also provides access to the 30,000+ free books available from Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...

, and it provides content channeled through Smashwords, allowing independent authors and publishers to self-publish.

The day before the iPad
IPad
The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc., primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. The iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010 by Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs. Its size and...

 event, Terry McGraw
Harold McGraw III
Harold Whittlesey "Terry" McGraw III is chairman, president and chief executive officer of McGraw-Hill Companies and chairman of the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of American companies.-At McGraw-Hill:...

, the CEO of McGraw-Hill
McGraw-Hill
The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., is a publicly traded corporation headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. Its primary areas of business are financial, education, publishing, broadcasting, and business services...

, appeared to divulge information to Erin Burnett on CNBC
CNBC
CNBC is a satellite and cable television business news channel in the U.S., owned and operated by NBCUniversal. The network and its international spinoffs cover business headlines and provide live coverage of financial markets. The combined reach of CNBC and its siblings is 390 million viewers...

 about the upcoming iPad release. This was quickly picked up and disseminated by rumor sites and eventually mainstream media outlets as revelation of features of the iPad. McGraw Hill was not included in the iPad presentation at the Apple media event and there was speculation that their exclusion was in response to this release of information. However, McGraw-Hill has stated that the information disclosed by McGraw was not privileged, and that they had not intended to participate in the event.

In 2011, an Apple spokesperson announced that "We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase." Due to the 30% revenue share that Apple receives from the in-app purchase mechanism, the financial viability of competing bookstore apps run by other book retailers is uncertain, even though in many countries, the iBookstore still does not provide consumers access to any books at all except for free out-of-copyright works.

Controversy

Some have claimed that the iBooks interface is a near exact replica of Classics by Andrew Kaz & Phill Ryu, released over a year prior and even featured in Apple's own TV commercials. Apple has made no acknowledgement of this.

Trademark dispute

In June 2011, Apple was sued by New York publisher John T. Colby over the use of the term "iBook".

Colby claims to be the owner of a trademark on the term 'ibooks' as applied to published books, after acquiring the assets of publisher Byron Preiss
Byron Preiss
Byron Preiss was an American writer, editor, and publisher. He founded and served as president of Byron Preiss Visual Publications, and later of iBooks.-Early life and career:...

, who had published a series of sci-fi and fantasy books under the term. Apple had previously used the term 'iBook
IBook
The iBook was a line of laptop computers sold by Apple Computer from 1999 to 2006. The line targeted the consumer and education markets, with lower specifications and prices than the PowerBook, Apple's higher-end line of laptop computers....

' to refer to a line of laptops that it sold until 2006, but Colby claims exclusive right to the term as applied to published books, including e-books. Apple began using the term 'iBooks' in 2010 to refer to e-books sold for the iPad.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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