Less than 24 hours away from Apple’s “education announcement” in New York City, Bloomberg weighs in reporting that the event, set to begin at 10 AM EST at the Guggenheim Museum, will be focused on iPad, digital textbooks for students from kindergarten to 12th grade (K-12) and self-publishers. Initially rumored to be about “textbooks” as suggested by Steve Jobs in the authorized biography by Walter Isaacson, speculation leading up to the even has seen different sources claiming Apple will have a broader set of announcements with textbooks, but also a strong iPad presence and new tools to create eBooks on the desktop. Specifically, Ars Technica referred to these tools as GarageBand for eBooks.

Bloomberg now claims Apple’s educational plans will be primarily focused on showing the potential of digital textbooks and iPads in schools:

The plans, to be unveiled by Apple Internet software chief Eddy Cue, are aimed at broadening the educational materials available for the iPad, especially for students in kindergarten to 12th grade, the people said. By setting its sights on the $10 billion-a-year textbook industry, Apple is using the tablet to encourage students to shun costly tomes that weigh down backpacks in favor of less-expensive, interactive digital books that can be updated anywhere via the Web.

According to Bloomberg, there will be announcements for both publishers and authors. Authors will be able to create new digital editions of their works using a modified version of ePub, a file format that is already used in the publishing industry. Bigger publishers will be able to create digital textbooks with embedded graphics and video, suggesting that rumors of a simple interface similar to GarageBand for managing media and content within an eBook might be correct after all. It is unclear whether Apple is preparing one or more “digital tools” for independent authors and large publishing companies, although Bloomberg noted:

Apple also wants to empower “self-publishers” to create new kinds of teaching tools, said the people. Teachers could use it to design materials for that week’s lesson. Scientists, historians and other authors could publish professional-looking content without a deal with a publisher.

If true, this would suggest the company has created an improved eBook creation tool atop of the ePub standard with different options for independent authors and publishers to distribute their creations digitally through iTunes, or, for instance, locally in a classroom. Teachers willing to collaborate with students on a week’s lesson clearly wouldn’t need the App Store or the iBookstore for distribution, which may lead to some interesting speculation about “textbook sharing” and a possible iCloud implementation, too.

Highly anticipated then quickly dismissed as “over-hyped”, Apple’s education event is shaping up to be an interesting milestone for the company in the field of education. The iPad has become Apple’s second best-selling device behind the iPhone, with the company expected to report record sales for the holiday quarter next week. In spite of the iPad and iTunes offering a variety of educational content in the form of apps, eBooks and iTunes U content, in two years of iPad Apple has yet to officially commit to education and schools as a viable market for the device. Schools and universities have adopted iPads with independent programs and initiatives; now Apple has a chance to unify its educational offerings with publishers deals, a clear policy for independent authors, new tools for eBook creation, and perhaps simpler distribution methods that don’t require iTunes in the classroom and will allow for educational discounts on volume purchases (which Apple is already doing).

We’ll be covering the news from tomorrow’s Apple event starting at 10 AM EST (7 AM Pacific time) here on MacStories.

Safari Books Online is a very popular service that, through a monthly or annual subscription model, allows you to access a vast catalog of design, development and business-related books and video trainings. Depending on your account, Safari Books Online lets you browse through a library of over 13,000 resources, and thanks to release of a brand new app today, this will also be possible directly from an iPad.

Safari To Go, available for free in the App Store, is a complete 2.0 rewrite of SBO’s previous App Store offering that provides a native interface for the iPad that follows Apple’s interface and usability guidelines, yet still enables you to enjoy the library of Safari Books Online, which includes ebooks from publishers like FT Press and O’Reilly. Safari To Go brings the functionalities you’d expect from a native iPad app: page swiping, offline reading mode and in-book keyword search. You can view your recently read books in a different view, mark items as favorites and create bookmarks. Additionally, you can watch videos in-app and perform a search by topic to find exactly what you’re looking for. Ken Yarmosh, one of the developers of Safari To Go 2.0, explains some of the technical decisions behind the app, such as why 3G connection only allows you to read an offline book:

As an example, notes and tags are not initially available in the application. Similarly, we found the performance on 3G to be sub-optimal due to the amount of content that transmits over the air. So, it was collectively decided that only an offline book should be accessible when on 3G for the first release of the v2.0 version.

Because of how we’ve built the app, we’re now in position to more quickly iterate on these and other features. In fact, we’re just now testing an update internally, which should be pushed to the App Store shortly. The Safari Books Online team also has a roadmap for upcoming releases with the expectation to update it and re-prioritize features based on customer feedback.

The free Safari to Go iPad app is available now in the App Store. You can sign up for a 10-day free trial on Safari Books Online here.

With Japan’s cramped living quarters, arrival of the iPad and other tablets and it’s non-existent e-book market, there has been an explosion of start-ups offering consumers to turn their paper books into e-books that can be used on such tablets as the iPad. Japan currently has the largest market for paper books and magazines, worth over $24 billion a year, yet the e-book market is currently earning less than $1 billion per year, driving customers to alternatives such as scanning books into PDF’s for use on tablets and e-readers.

One such start-up, Bookscan was founded by Yusuke Ohki and childhood friend, Shinya Iwamatsu last April and has done gangbusters, expanding its workforce to 120 people in less than 12 months. Ohki said to Bloomberg “the iPad’s release is the biggest factor in making this business possible” and said his inspiration for starting the business was the 2000 physical books that were crowding out his small Tokyo apartment.

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A new company focused on creating ‘a new breed of digital books’, Push Pop Press today unveiled their teaser site, beautifully minimal in its design and purely hinting at what is to come. However John Gruber over at Daring Fireball wrote up a fairly lengthy post about Push Pop Press and a demo he had been given last week, praising it and giving some fairly detailed insights into what is to come from the company.

The teaser site offers up a description of the mission of Push Pop Press;

Our team is bringing together great content and beautiful software to create a new breed of digital books. Books that let you explore photos, videos, music, maps, and interactive graphics, all through a new physics-based multi-touch user interface.

The team over at Push Pop Press is undoubtedly one high caliber bunch of people, with Mike Matas, Kimon Tsinteris and Austin Sarner. Mike Matas, the designer and co-founder is most notably known for working on Delicious Library and his stint at Apple (which started the young age of 19) in helping design the original iOS. The other co-founder, Kimon Tsinteris is a software architect and worked with Matas at Apple on the Map app on iOS. Finally Austin Sarner is software engineer who may be familiar from his apps including AppZapper, Disco and Pennies.

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Jason Snell, reporting for Macworld about Apple’s statement regarding ebook reading apps and in-app purchases:

For a couple of years now, Apple has been boasting about how many millions of iTunes IDs are linked to credit cards. Recent rumblings suggest that the company is seeking to expand the footprint of its financial services, too. It’s clear that Apple is tired of seeing companies make money on content served to iOS devices without using its system or cutting it in for a piece of the action. The current 30-percent cut of all content purchases would seem to be an impediment to getting partners to embrace Apple’s system; on the other hand, Apple’s the gatekeeper to its platform and if other companies don’t want to play ball with Apple, they’ll be on the outside looking in.

That’s exactly the point. You have to look at this whole Sony / Apple / everyone else story in two separate ways: the business perspective and consumers’ expectations. Apple does business, and it wants publishers selling content on its iOS platform to pay the fee all developers pay. The fee is 30 percent. Whether or not Apple will ease this fee and allow for lower revenue cut on ebook content is unclear, but it’s a possibility. Maybe tomorrow’s event won’t just be about The Daily, who knows. (more…)

News broke last night that Apple rejected Sony’s latest ebook reading app for the iPhone because it used a technology that allowed users to purchase books out of Apple’s in-app purchase system, through Sony’s own store embedded into the app. Sony claimed Apple told them “from now on, all in-app purchases would have to go through Apple”, and now Apple has fired back to clarify Sony’s statements.

As reported by The Loop:

We have not changed our developer terms or guidelines,” Apple spokesperson, Trudy Muller, told The Loop. “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.

Basically, nothing has really changed in the guidelines — except the fact that in-app purchase through Apple’s system has to be built into the app. If an app comes with its own store to purchase books, the same option should be offered as native in-app purchase for all iOS users. Apple takes a 30% revenue cut out of every in-app purchase. It seems like at this point Amazon will have to update its Kindle app as well to offer iOS in-app purchases. I will be interesting to see how Sony, Amazon and others will update their applications to support the new in-app purchase guideline, and users’ reaction to multiple offerings inside an ebook reading app. While Apple’s 30% cut sounds like a deal-breaker to publishers, in-app purchases linked to iTunes are seen as a useful option from customers, which will be able to get receipts and detailed information about their book purchases directly into their iTunes account page.

An important update to the official Kindle app for iOS (free and universal for iPhone and iPad) was released earlier today. Version 2.5 of the app adds much requested features that should satisfy all the Kindle users on the iOS platform that have been asking for functionalities such as proper multitasking support and access to the free Internet archive of Project Gutenberg books.

Kindle 2.5 for iOS, in fact, can now download books in the background leveraging iOS 4 APIs and supports thousands of ebooks downloaded through Project Gutenberg. Most of all, the app can now load files from any other iOS app thanks to the “Open in” feature seen in Safari, Mail and any other iPhone or iPad app that can forward files to other applications that can open a specific file type. This means you can now add your own files to the Kindle app, or even better drag & drop files into it using iTunes’ File Sharing. To add books in this way, simply connect your device to iTunes, head over the Apps tab in the device’s info screen, and drag files onto the Kindle section right below the iOS Springboard preview window. The bad news is that, like the actual Kindle, epub books don’t seem to be supported at this time.

Other new features and improvements in this update include bug fixes, a new book indicator and better image zooming. You can get Kindle for iOS for free here.

Google launched its official eBook store earlier today, and promised an official iOS app for iPhone and iPad would follow in a few hours. The app is now available for free in iTunes here.

Google Books allows you to check on Google’s 2 million book catalogue and download ebooks to read them on your iPhone and iPad. The app comes with the same page turning animations of Apple’s iBooks, but the overall interface is quite different and similar to Google’s standard color schemes. Google Books features an offline reading mode to read books when you don’t have an active internet connection (useful on WiFi iPads when on the go), possibility to search within a book and adjust a font’s size, a night reading mode.

Surprisingly enough, the app doesn’t seem to support landscape mode on the iPad. I found the scrubber at the bottom to be particularly useful to jump between chapters of a book. Last, the app lets you download 3 books for free: “Pride and Prejudice”, “Frankeinstein, or, The Modern Prometeus” and “Wonderful Stories for Children”.

Check out the full changelog and more screenshots below.

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