Apple made several announcements yesterday which can drive the textbook’s digital transformation — or, in Steve Jobs’ more colourful phrase, its “digital destruction”. My pick is that this will  be the tipping point for educational publishing, its ‘iPod moment’ or ‘Kindle moment’ when the market suddenly takes off. But Apple’s moves will go much further [...]

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A couple of weeks ago, the publishing industry’s EPUB3 specification was finally signed off. This was the cue for device makers and e-reading app developers to build it into their next releases and for publishers to start work on enhanced ebooks. Now Amazon has responded with its own next generation ebook format, Kindle Format 8 (KF8), complicating [...]

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A big hole in the eReading landscape has just been filled with the launch of independent ebook reading app Bluefire. The free iPad and iPhone app will read ePub formatted ebooks, including ebooks encrypted with Adobe’s ACS4 digital rights management. While there are already several eReading apps that will do this, what sets Bluefire apart is that [...]

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Publishers who want to produce their own Kindle-ready ebooks can now do it directly from within the Adobe InDesign page layout software using a free plug-in thatAmazon has just released. The plug-in adds an “Export to Kindle” facility which generates the file in a few clicks, similar to InDesign’s native ePub export facility. This is [...]

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The Blio e-reading platform launched today,  promising to deliver the Holy Grail of a rich visual experience and good readability on mobile devices. Unfortunately, today’s launch was of the Windows version only and this probably explains why, like many commentators, I’m feeling a little underwhelmed and even disappointed by it. After months of build-up, Blio [...]

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