Apple fanatics around the world are hotly anticipating the arrival of Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 656pgs) the biography by Walter Isaacson, which hits shelves on Monday October 24. Isaacson, a high-profile biographer, was granted Jobs’ full cooperation with the book and was allowed exclusive access to the highly private entrepreneur. The pair met for dozens of interviews, the last taking place a few short weeks before the creative visionary’s passing on October 5. In an interview with the Associated Press, Isaacson provides an early glimpse into Jobs’ private life. Their conversations touched on many subjects, including the impetus for the Apple name, which Jobs came up with after visiting an apple orchard during his experimentation with a fruitarian diet. He felt the name was “fun, spirited and not intimidating.” Read more…

This week Amazon released Kindle Cloud Reader, an HTML5-based app that works with Safari and Chrome web browsers. This new reader, optimized for the iPad, allows Amazon to circumvent Apple’s recent restrictions on their native iOS apps, preventing companies from linking directly to their online stores. Users can now login to read.amazon.com to access their Kindle library and purchase new books. They have the option of reading eBooks in the cloud or downloading volumes to read offline. Along with iPads, the web-based app will also work with Safari and Chrome on Macs and PCs, however the Firefox web browser is not yet supported. According to an article on TechCrunch, the iPhone platform is not supported either. But, an iPhone friendly version is presumed to be in the works. Read more…

On Monday, Google debuted their new Google eBookstore, and will now compete with Apple and Amazon for a share of the lucrative eBooks pie. As announced on the company’s official blog, consumers will be able to “browse and search through the largest eBooks collection in the world with more than three million titles including hundreds of thousands for sale.” This launch is significant in that Google eBooks are not linked to a specific device but are compatible across many platforms “— everything from laptops to netbooks to tablets to smartphones to e-readers.” The books themselves are stored in the cloud instead of on an individual piece of hardware. “That means you can access your eBooks like you would messages in Gmail or photos in Picasa – using a free, password-protected Google account with unlimited eBooks storage.” Read more…

Yesterday, Amazon sent out a press release announcing that eBook sales have now outpaced hardcover sales and touting the increased sales of lower priced Kindle units. Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, stated, “Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books – astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.” In the past three months Amazon has sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books it has sold in the U.S. In the past month, Amazon has increased that ratio by selling 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books it’s sold. The number of eBooks sales in the first half of 2010 is more than triple the number sold in the first half of 2009. Amazon also applauds a group of five authors that have sold more than 500,000 Kindle books. Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts have all passed the half million mark.
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Steve Jobs’ presentation at the Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday revealed some interesting facts about the iPad’s eBook sales and the new features planned for the iBooks app. Engadget reported on Job’s impressive announcement that in the few short months since the iPad’s release, Apple has won 22 percent of the eBook market. In the first 65 days that the “magical” device was available to the public, five million eBooks were downloaded by iPad users. To capitalize on this success, Jobs also announced some great new features set to be added to the iBooks app later in the month. Users will be able to read PDF documents with iBooks, as well as utilize new note-taking and bookmarking functions.
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Yesterday, AppAdvice.com reported that the iBooks App for Apple’s new iPad will feature the entire Gutenberg Project catalog free of charge. An incredible digital resource, the Gutenberg Project is maintained with the help of thousands of volunteers, and offers more than 30,000 digitized books for free. The books are available in a variety of digital formats (ePub, HTML, etc.) and can be viewed on PCs, smart phones, eReaders, and soon the iPad. All of their titles are in the public domain, and AppleInsider.com speculates that Apple pursued this partnership in order to head off the propagation of inferior apps created to make a profit on books already free to the public. We’re big supporters of reading for free at In the Stax, and applaud Apple for providing these valuable resources to their consumers at no charge.
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The fight for supremacy on the eBook frontier has gotten ugly. Last week, book-selling giant Amazon battled with Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the U.S., over eBook prices. The New York Times reports that Macmillan CEO John Sargent flew to Seattle on Thursday to meet with Amazon execs and push to move to a pricing model where the publisher would set consumer prices for eBooks, with new releases ranging from $12.99 to $14.99, and Amazon taking a 30% sales commission. These terms are similar to the agreement Macmillan now has with Apple, to sell its titles on the new iBooks app for the iPad. However, Amazon remained adamant about maintaining its current $9.99 price point for new releases, and after a tense stand-off, stopped selling books from Macmillan and its family of imprints on Friday (though the publisher’s titles could still be purchased from third party vendors on the site.)
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Earlier this morning, Steve Jobs introduced the world to Apple’s latest technological marvel: the iPad. The slick new interactive tablet, which looks a lot like an iPhone on steroids, allows users to browse the web, get e-mail, view photos and video, play music and games… and read books.

Just .5″ thick and weighing 1.5 pounds, the iPad’s 9.7″ glossy multi-touch IPS display offers considerably more screen real estate than its competitors in the eReader space. Both the Nook by Barnes & Noble and the Amazon Kindle 2 have 6″ screens, though the Nook does also have a 3.5″ color nav screen. Like the Nook, the iPad will use the ePub format.

Apple’s new iBooks app (which works similar to iTunes) and its partnership with 5 big publishing houses: Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster, allow users to  access a wide selection of titles that are easily purchased and downloaded. In addition to books, The New York Times has already announced its new app for the iPad, and a number of other publications are rumored to be in talks with Apple to provide content for the device.
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