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Apple iBooks 2 license agreement gets icy reception in higher education
Leaders of the open-license textbook movement heap criticism on restrictiveness of iBooks 2 publishing platform
A blogger who tracks Apple products called the iBooks 2 license agreement 'Apple at its worst.'
Advocates for open-license textbooks in higher education, while largely unhappy with Apple’s new iBooks 2 platform, say the technology behemoth has done a favor for their movement: Apple’s pricey, limiting approach to digital textbooks is in stark contrast to the textbook model that aims for low-cost or free college texts.
iBooks 2, announced to great fanfare during a flashy Jan. 19 press conference in New York City, offers iBooks Author software that enables instructors and others to create and publish their own interactive digital textbooks in the Apple iBooks Bookstore. Some campus technology leaders hailed the new iBooks platform as a revolution in digital publishing.
Others took a close look at the iBooks 2 licensing agreement’s fine print and called it “crazy evil,” “mind-bogglingly greedy,” and “deliberate sabotage” of the open, industry-leading standard known as EPUB.
Since 2010, Apple has publicly supported the popular EPUB standard, bringing hope to many in higher education that the company would someday abide by those open standards that could lower skyrocketing book costs.
But iBooks 2 and the iBooks Author software “locks out” that standard, Ed Bott, a technology writer and expert on license agreements, wrote in his blog.
Apple chose a closed system in which the company controls the creation and distribution of textbooks—which will start at $14.99 for K-12 textbooks—that directly undercuts the slow but steady effort to expand low-cost textbooks that can be accessed on any device, not just iPads.
“It is underscoring the difference between the two approaches, only one of which encourages the education community to rally around a set of principles,” said Eric Frank, co-founder and president of Flat World Knowledge, an open textbook publishing company. “It really shows that there is a different future for textbooks and illustrates the problems with the other model, the closed approach.”
Open-license textbook proponents said iBooks 2 follows the same successful approach taken by the company in its ubiquitous iTunes model.
3 Responses to Apple iBooks 2 license agreement gets icy reception in higher education
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thecman
February 1, 2012 at 1:12 pm
I think a good part of the article misses the point about the licensing. I am generally a supporter of Apple but will and do call them out when the stumble. I have not read the licensing agreement for iBooks2 but, if Apple is claiming intellectual property to published (or unpublished) works, this is unconscionable. Any company especially Apple should be better than this.
As far as setting the open textbook movement back, I think the article is way off base. If you were paying attention to the announcement they are partnering with publishing companies. Most publishing companies, (recording companies, movie companies, etc.) want to have some guarantee that their published materials will be protected from piracy so they can sell the work. I can not speculate what Apples intentions were for creating a new format but I am almost positive that the publishing houses would demanded that there be a copy protection method in place before they would come to the table.
Now if the analogy of iTunes is to fully be replicated, this is a first step. When iTunes started there was a DRM. It took several years but this has been dropped. But it took Apple to start offering legally downloadable material that benefited both the author and consumer. I have a small degree of hope that they are trying to do the same thing with textbooks that they did with music. That is to make the publishers of the content realize that there is a way to both help consumers and make a profit on the material being sold. So it is possible that this could be the best thing to happen to the open text book movement. That of first gaining legitimacy for electronic delivery. Where it goes from there will remain to be seen.
barkan
February 2, 2012 at 7:56 pm
I am a big fan of Apple and have a lot of their products, but I am also an author for the open-source textbook company Flat World Knowledge (http://flatworldknowledge.com/) mentioned in the article. I agree that Apple’s approach, while commendable in some respects, is not very open. Flat World’s model–providing textbooks free online and via a variety of low-cost alternatives–is much preferable.
guadfather
February 7, 2012 at 9:33 am
I think Apple is getting a bit of a bad rap on this, and the article had some inaccuracies. First of all iBooks 2 does not lock out ePub, you can use it to read an ePub just fine (and PDFs too). And iBooks Author is just that, a app for authoring iBooks specifically. One uses this app if they want to sell a book through Apple’s iBooks store; it’s essentially a utility for the formatting of content for the store. It isn’t a general purpose content creation app, and they don’t even charge for it . Now don’t get me wrong, they will be making money off of these book, and probably a lot. But they are also doing a lot encourage the development of a lot of free content too, especially in the textbook space. I think that free textbooks are a great thing, but what we need to do is focus on getting instructors to adopt them. It doesn’t seem to me like a tool that Apple made for people who want to sell stuf on their store is at the root of the problem.