Exact Editions Blog

The Ibis reader was released a week ago and it gets a very solid review from the Wired blog Gadget Lab:

Ibis reader is an e-book reading application that does everything that you’d expect an iPhone e-reader to do, with one big difference: It doesn’t come from the App Store. The app runs on any iPhone or iPod Touch and offers full offline access to your library of books, and is as fast and responsive as a native iPhone

I am sure you noticed that Steve Jobs was reported as really going at Google, and particularly targeting Android. There has also been a good deal of discussion on the Apple:Adobe kerfuffle over Flash. Some of the best points are being made by John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

Here’s what I mean about Flash Player’s performance being a distraction from the underlying story: Even if Adobe solves Flash’s performance problems, I still doubt Apple will want to include

Increasingly I rely on my Twitter stream for arresting issues in publishing technology. First off, yesterday was a thoughtful blog post at Semantico on the choice facing publishers on whether to go into the iPad platform via individual apps, or via the iBook store. Richard Padley’s conclusion:

For straightforward chapter based book content it seems clear there is no longer a compelling case for publishers to deliver e-books as apps. The extra cost of software development, combined with the slowness

The Google Books Search Settlement came to court last week for a Fairness Hearing. There is now a full transcript, but like many who follow the case closely, but not too closely (it could easily become an obsession), I have mainly relied on Twitter comments and the excellent blog of Professor James Grimmelmann, The Laboratorium, as a way of keeping in touch with what is going on. Grimmelmann and his students have also produced a fascinating, colourful and … Keep Reading

So the question arises: how are publishers to make their offerings uniquely attractive in the multi-media maelstrom of the iPhone/iPad space? Keep in mind that we are operating under two constraints: first, the shop is a media hypermarket — iTunes is an ecommerce environment in which all types of media product and service can be purchased (Apple are going to have to do something about that name, ‘iTunes’ is off-key for most other media). The competition will be naked and … Keep Reading