Amazon took not just a page from Apple’s book, but apparently a whole site. Elsewhere, Intel is telling it like it is, and Jonathan Ive racks up yet another major award. What were the remainders for Thursday, April 18, 2013 saying again?

Amazon’s Goodreads Purchase Scuttled Apple Partnership (Wall Street Journal, subscription required)

Sneaksy Bezoses! Before Amazon snapped up Goodreads, the book-recommendation site was apparently on the verge of doing a deal to integrate its content with Apple’s iBookstore. Which at least explains why the only recommendation I get from the iBookstore is to read Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs. Over and over again. Forever.

Intel’s CEO coy about hinting at Apple deal (CNet)

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A furor erupted on the Internet on Tuesday—not that it takes very much—when comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan announced that the latest issue in his series Saga would not be available for purchase via the Comixology app, due to explicit sexual images that were allegedly deemed objectionable by Apple. This despite the fact that the series had previously contained other images of a graphic nature that had not caused objections.

At the time, Vaughan himself noted on the website of his publisher, Image Comics, “you might be able to find SAGA #12 in Apple’s iBookstore, which apparently sometimes allows more adult material to be sold than through its apps. Crazy, right?”

However, it appears that Vaughan may have been jumping the gun in assigning blame. Apple confirmed to Macworld later on Wednesday that it did not block Saga #12, and Comixology CEO David Steinberger subsequently took responsibility in a post on the company’s blog:

As a partner of Apple, we have an obligation to respect its policies for apps and the books offered in apps.  Based on our understanding of those policies, we believed that Saga #12 could not be made available in our app, and so we did not release it today.

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Marvel Comics was an innovator when it launched its Digital Comics Unlimited subscription service in 2007. But sometimes being an innovator can burn: The company built that initiative on top of Adobe Flash just as the iPhone arrived on the scene and made Flash irrelevant to a new generation of mobile devices.

With Saturday’s release of the new Marvel Unlimited iOS app (an Android app is forthcoming), Marvel’s subscription service has a new name and a home on mobile devices at last.

Marvel Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital, Peter Phillips, admits that his team has been anxious to get the service off of Flash for some time. “We wish we could’ve done it a little bit faster,” Phillips said. “This app offers a much better user experience and provides access to a lot more digital comics.”

Marvel, like most comics publishers, has been selling a la carte issues via its own app and Comixology’s Comics app. But the new Marvel Unlimited app gives fans of the publisher of such characters as Spider-Man, X-Men, and Avengers access to a Netflix-style library of more than 13,000 comics. Like Netflix, subscribers to Marvel’s service (it’s $10 per month or $60 for a year) can read as many comics as they want—but also like Netflix, the offerings don’t include the latest issues. Instead, Marvel Unlimited offers a catalog of classic issues (dating back as far as the 1960s) as well as issues from the recent past, roughly six months to a year ago. For example, in early March Marvel posted the first issue of AvX, which was originally published in April 2012.

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Update: Amazon has released an update that fixes the issue described below.

Kindle app devotees will want to shy away from the Update All button in the App Store for the time being. Amazon recently released an update to the app, but unlucky upgraders discovered that the app update logged them out and wiped out their stored books.

The good news is, if you got bitten by the bug, you didn’t lose much but time and patience: All your Kindle ebook purchases remain available to you, and you can re-download them from within the app.

“There is a known issue with this update,” Amazon writes in the app’s current What’s New notes in the App Store. “If you are an existing Kindle for iOS user, we recommend you do not install this update at this time.”

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Earlier this week, we posted a podcast version of the Alternative Publishing Roundtable session from our Macworld Live stage at the Macworld/iWorld 2013 conference. Here’s a video highlight from that discussion, hosted by Macworld’s Serenity Caldwell and featuring Adam and Tonya Engst of TidBits and Take Control Books, Paperless ebook author David Sparks, and former Amazon and Apple product manager Scott Simpson.

If you’d prefer to watch the session on alternative publishing, visit the Macworld channel on YouTube.

Apple was ordered by a Beijing court on Thursday to pay a total of 1.03 million yuan ($165,000) for selling unlicensed ebooks, according to a report by China’s official Xinhua news agency.

The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court ruled the money must be paid to eight Chinese writers and two companies, who said they found applications selling large numbers of unlicensed versions of their books last year, causing large losses, Xinhua reported.

Apple violated part of China’s Copyright Law and failed in its duty regarding how it provides applications online, Xinhua reported.

The authors included Murong Xuecun, Li Chengpeng and He Ma, who are popular writers often on the country’s bestseller lists, according to a report in the China Daily.

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Apple and four other ebook publishers have settled an antitrust battle with the European Union.

After a year of investigations into allegations of cartel price-fixing, the European Commission has decided to accept commitments to alter ebook pricing practices from Harper Collins, Hachette Livre, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Macmillan and Apple.

The Commission concluded that an infringement had very possibly taken place when the publishers together with Apple jointly switched to an agency sales model to set ebook prices.

Despite this, the competition watchdog decided not to impose fines, instead opting to accept promises from the companies that they will terminate the current agency agreements and, for a period of two years, will not hamper ebook retailers, such as Amazon, from setting their own prices for ebooks or from offering discounts and promotions.

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Originally released in early 2012, Apple’s education-themed ebook creation tool took bold steps as the first WYSIWYG program to export an ebook just as its author envisioned it. As I noted in my review of that software, however, the first version of iBooks Author was very much a 1.0 product, with strange omissions and odd workflows for users who didn’t want to build textbooks. Ten months later, an updated version—iBooks Author 2.0 (Mac App Store)—brings simplified tools, new templates, portrait-only options, and a better publishing workflow to the table. Naturally, I couldn't resist taking the updated program for a spin.

Not just for textbooks anymore

Though Apple’s software still clearly slants toward the education market, this second version of iBooks Author acknowledges that people might want to create other styles and types of books. The template chooser offers three new landscape templates: Photo Book, which emphasizes big images alongside text; Antique, reminiscent of an old storybook; and Cookbook, self-explanatory and nice for authors planning to publish or collect recipes.

Like iBooks Author's textbook templates, the new landscape templates are organized by chapter and section, and have a mandatory glossary, but the section headers look less like they belong in a textbook. (The new templates ditch the outline-style Section 1.1 and 1.1.1 section heads in favor of a simple Section 1.)

Portrait-only options (but no iPhone love)

In addition to the three new landscape templates, iBooks Author introduces portrait-only templates, which seem to be aimed toward Apple’s new iPad mini. Most of the new portrait-only templates skew away from the textbook design, instead targeting specific reading genres: Biography and Photo Book offer basic designs for those book types, while Gazette, Classic Text, and Charcoal take their cues from storybooks and picture books. Modern Basic is the lone new textbook-style template, and even it leans more toward minimalistic how-to than full-fledged instructional manual. In total, the program offers nine new templates (though you can always purchase additional templates from non-Apple vendors or create your own in-program).

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Don’t adjust your Retina display; I’m not Lex Friedman, but this is still The Weekly Wrap. This week, Apple announced a slew of new products for you to spend your hard-earned money on, we took a look at some great new software and hardware, and what week would be complete without us showing you how to do things that you’ve never done before.

Most of all, though, we’re just glad that Apple is now officially cool.

Center stage

Primadonna that Apple is, the company demanded our attention on Tuesday. If, somehow, you missed out on the dynamic duo of Tim Cook and Phil Schiller, you can relive the experience with our live blog.

At the center of the event were, of course, updates to iBooks and iBooks Author. And here I thought that books were called “television” these days—at least that explains the overlooked Final Cut Pro X update the company snuck out.

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In addition to unveiling a slew of new hardware on Tuesday, Apple also announced version 3 of iBooks, its reading app for the iPad and iPhone. We’ll have a full review soon, but in the meantime, here are some early impressions from our initial hands-on experience with the app.

The most prominent new features are iBooks’s new scrolling theme, newly integrated sharing options, and an Amazon-inspired, iCloud-powered bookshelf.

Let’s start with that last feature, since the iBooks bookshelf is the first thing that greets you when you launch the app. Previously, it listed the books you’d downloaded to your iOS device. With iBooks 3, you’ll see every book you own listed. Those books that reside only in iCloud sport a tiny cloud download icon on the upper right corners; tap on them, and they’ll download so that you can start reading them. If you want to delete a book from your bookshelf outright, you get that option under the Delete button, too. Once you’ve done that, you can restore that book to your bookshelf only from the Purchased Books tab in the iBookstore.

Once you’re reading a book, you can take advantage of the other two prominent new features in iBooks. The first is a new theme called Scroll. That option joins Book (the skeuomorphic theme with which iBooks first launched) and Full Screen (which hides the pseudo-book chrome and lets the text fill up the entirety of your display.

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Good news for readers: Apple on Tuesday announced the newest version of its ereader software, iBooks, available as a free download on the App Store for iOS devices.

Apple CEO Tim Cook began his iBooks demo with a brief overview on the iBookstore, noting that customers have downloaded more than 400 million books. The iBooks app is “one of the most popular apps on the store,” said Cook, before outlining the enhancements in the new version.

The app now supports more than 40 languages—including Korean, Chinese, and Japanese—and features a new “continuous scrolling” reading option for those who prefer scrolling over page-turning. Another welcome addition: iCloud not only syncs your page turns, but all your purchased iBookstore books over your various devices. (Cook did not mention on-stage if books purchased elsewhere would also sync.)

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Kindle-exclusive books have been purchased, downloaded or borrowed more than 100 million times, Amazon announced Tuesday.

The number of exclusive titles in the Kindle library has grown to 180,000 from 130,000 in April, Amazon said.

The significance of the new Amazon data is that nearly all these books are available for Kindle device owners who also have a Prime membership.

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When it comes to electronic publishing, the waters of ebook creation are murky and deep, full of confusing exceptions, varied formats, and non-existent support. Even Apple’s clean, simplistic style is largely absent from its iBookstore publishing program: The company’s tools are primitive and, in the case of iWork application Pages, far out of date. But despite these problems, publishers may now at the least be able to seek solutions from Apple itself, thanks to a new telephone support option from the company.

Originally, iBookstore publishers could only query the iBookstore staff about problems via a contact form—one with an incredibly slow response time, at that—or by attending Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference and speaking to an engineer. The new telephone support line, which is available for publishers Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific, is a major improvement in ebook publisher relations, and a boon for learning ebook best practices, too.

If you have an iTunes Connect account and publish to the iBookstore, you can call the support line at any time for any issue the company already covers under email support. That includes publishing and tax problems, ePub and iBooks Author questions, sales information, and more. Calls are toll-free from the United States and Canada; international rates apply to calls made from outside of these countries.

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The TED series of brainy, idea-mongering lectures became a phenomenon among the YouTube cognoscenti in recent years, and now the people behind the lecture series have unveiled a new app to keep the conversation going.

TED Books hit the App Store on Monday, and the app promises to unleash a new idea-driven book to users every two weeks. The app itself is free to download, but the books aren’t. Users can either pay $15 for a three-month, six-book subscription, or they can instead take the a la carte route and pay $3 per title. Users who subscribe within 90 days of the app’s launch can download the entire roster of books at no additional charge.

The books themselves range beyond mere text versions of the famous TED Talks—they include audio, video, and social-networking features. Most TED ebooks contain fewer than 20,000 words, and are designed to be read in one sitting.

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The old Reading Rainbow TV series filled thousands of children with a love of books and stories during its two-decade run on PBS and made host LeVar Burton a hero to budding bibliophiles everywhere. But the new Reading Rainbow for iPad app isn’t merely an exercise in nostalgia: It wants to create a new generation of readers.

The free app debuted Tuesday, offering more than 150 multimedia books for kids—the target audience is age 3 to 9—along with Burton-hosted videos depicting trips to submarines, museums, and other interesting locations.

When you open the app, it asks you to enter a name, age, and gender, then to select three favorite topics from a list of 9. My 3-year-old son, Tobias, assisted me in this task, choosing “Things That Go,” “Space & Beyond,” and “Pirates” as his favorites.

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Amazon on Thursday released updates to the Kindle app for iOS, along with the Kindle Cloud Reader Web app. The updates add in support for children’s books, comics, and graphic novels.

With children’s books, artwork can appear in full color, with fixed layouts and—in some cases—Kindle Text Pop-Up, which magnifies the text for easier reading.

The new Kindle Panel View makes reading comics and graphic novels simpler and more immersive; in our early exploration using the updated Kindle app on a new iPad, even tiny comic book next was easy to read. Tap on an individual comic panel for a magnified view.

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Apple on Monday handed out its annual Apple Design Awards to developers behind the best Mac and iOS apps of the year. The company looked to award those apps that were well-designed, state of the art, and innovative—and available for sale in the Mac or iOS App Stores.

On the iPhone side, the company recognized Disney’s Where's My Water, a casual game; Halfbrick Studios’s Jetpack Joyride ( ), a cave-flyer style game; and National Geographic Society’s National Parks app.

The winners on the iPad side were Fifty Three’s Paper, an innovative drawing app; GameCollage’s Bobo Explores Light, an educational science book for kids; and Fingerlab’s DM1 - The Drum Machine—an advanced vintage drum machine simulator.

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You might think that the week before Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference -- where the company is expected to unveil iOS 6 and potentially reveal a few surprises along the way -- would be a quiet one. Of course, you might also think that the duck-billed platypus is extinct. You’d be wrong on both counts. Let’s remember the Macworld week just ended:

In the news

Virgin Mobile will become the second U.S. prepaid carrier to carry the iPhone, as Apple continues its quest to get every man, woman, child, and well-trained mammal in this country to start using one of its smartphones.

A couple of third parties announced accessories that offer USB 3 connectivity on your Mac via Thunderbolt. Speaking of connections, before you make yours at some airports, you may relieve some stress with iPad installations there.

On the Web, LinkedIn had a rough week, though at least anyone fired at the company in the wake of a pair of security lapses should have a head-start on finding contacts to hit up for new work. Meanwhile, Google bought QuickOffice, furthering Google’s plan of, you know, owning everything.

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Apple is continuing its defense in the class action lawsuit that accuses it of conspiring to raise ebook prices.

In a response filed on May 29, Apple claims that publishers were not happy with Amazon’s pricing tactics and wanted to set their own prices in the iBookstore.

In its filing, Apple claims “that publicly and privately in their individual discussions with Apple, representatives of each of the publishers separately expressed varying degrees of unhappiness with Amazon’s tactics, including its pricing.”

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Does it seem like iBooks is asking you to sign in with your Apple ID unexpectedly? Are you tearing your hair out because you’ve used every single template in Apple’s Cards app? Do you feel like you’re losing your mind and your patience? Well, a pair of updates from Apple can help you with those first two problems—which may in turn deal with that third one.

Released on Monday, iBooks 2.1.1 fixes that issue with the Apple ID login dialog that pops up like a hockey-masked slasher in a horror movie. Just fire up iBooks after you’ve installed the update, and the problem should be all ironed out. For kicks, Apple has also thrown in some minor stability and performance improvements to make iBooks even iBookier.

If you’re less into reading sentiments than writing them, the latest update to Apple’s Cards, also released on Monday, might hold the key to your heart. Top amongst the additions in Version 1.1 are templates for Mother’s Day—less than a month away—which take advantage of Cards’s typical letterpress stylings. New Get Well designs let you express your sympathies on 100-percent cotton paper, and the app has also rolled in additional options for birthdays and thank you cards, among others. Overall, there are now 34 templates to choose from in Cards, an increase from the 21 included at launch.

Nice as those extra templates are, Apple also spent some time improving the process of using Cards: Checking out once you’ve designed your card is now simpler, and verifying an address for the envelope is more accurate than previously.

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The Department of Justice threw the book at Apple. Apple and several others threw their technical resources up against the Flashback virus. And I threw together this very edition of the Weekly Wrap, highlighting Macworld’s most interesting and important stories from the past week.

Ebook-ends

As expected, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a price fixing lawsuit against several large ebook publishers—and Apple. The DOJ alleges that the companies colluded on pricing for ebooks in violation of federal law. Apple says the DOJ’s accusations are “untrue,” which is certainly a better counter argument than “yep, we’re guilty as sin.”

Some observers say that the DOJ’s case will be a boon to Amazon, handing that company the ebook market. We debated the impact any legal decision might have on ebook prices; one theory holds that if the DOJ emerges victorious in its case, ebook prices will see a race to the bottom, with cheap ebooks spreading like a virus. An analogy we use only to facilitate a segue into…

The Flashback Trojan horse of doom

Man, Flashback had a good week (in terms of press attention), but a lousy one (in the sense that it’s pretty much dead now).

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Apple has issued a rare public comment in response to the price fixing lawsuit filed against it and several large ebook publishers by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told Macworld:

The DOJ’s accusation of collusion against Apple is simply not true. The launch of the iBookstore in 2010 fostered innovation and competition, breaking Amazon’s monopolistic grip on the publishing industry. Since then customers have benefited from ebooks that are more interactive and engaging. Just as we’ve allowed developers to set prices on the App Store, publishers set prices on the iBookstore.

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The U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five book publishers over alleged e-book price fixing means that the publishers have to reinvent their digital futures, some experts said.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, accused executives of Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster of meeting regularly beginning in late 2008 to discuss e-book pricing and Amazon.com’s decision to sell most e-books for $9.99. Apple later offered agreements with the publishers to sell the books for $12.99 or more, the DOJ alleged.

Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster have agreed to settle the DOJ’s lawsuit.

The lawsuit shows a book publishing industry grasping for ways to make money on e-books, said Allen Weiner, vice president of research in Gartner’s media research group. “Book publishers have absolutely no idea on how to price e-books,” Weiner said.

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The U.S. Department of Justice has warned Apple and five U.S. book publishers that it is planning to file lawsuits against them for allegedly colluding to fix the prices of e-books, according to a media report.

The DOJ is preparing lawsuits against Apple, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, Macmillan, and HarperCollins Publishers, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, quoting anonymous sources.

A DOJ official told U.S. lawmakers in December that the agency was investigating e-book pricing. That announcement followed one by the European Union, which said it was investigating Apple and the same five publishers.

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If iPad owners found their Spidey-senses tingling on Tuesday afternoon, it was for good reason—Marvel announced it was making 80 graphic novels featuring Spider Man, the X-Men, Captain America, and other popular characters available in Apple's iBookstore.

Marvel, of course, has its own well-regarded iOS app that offers mostly single issues of comics. Marvel's offerings in the iBookstore, meanwhile, focus more on multi-issue stories that have been collected into a single edition—and the prices reflect that. Prices range from $7 for many of the novels up to $25 for X-Men: Second Coming.

To draw readers in, Marvel is offering New Avengers #1 free of charge for a limited time. The company says it will offer new titles on a weekly basis.

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With Macworld | iWorld in the books, we turn our attention back to some products making news before the annual Mac event—iBooks 2 and iBooks Author. Apple introduced the two apps during last month’s education-centric press event, and we’ve since had the chance to review and rate both products. I’m joined by those reviewers—staff writer Lex Friedman and staff editor Serenity Caldwell—to go over their experiences with iBooks 2 and iBooks Author.

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Lex reviewed iBooks 2 while Serenity did the honors for iBooks Author. During the iBooks Author discussion, Serenity mentions Apple’s support documents for the ebook publishing tool: You’ll find those on Apple’s website.

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While iPad textbooks have been making news as of late, ebooks in general are a pretty familiar sight on the iPad. While some ebooks are mere digital “ports” of their printed counterparts, others, like Kite Readers’ new Be Global ebook takes the print version and adds interactive elements to enhance the experience. Be Global is being unveiled at Macworld | iWorld this week to coincide with its availability on the iOS App Store.

Based on the book, What Does it Mean to be Global? by Rana DiOrio, the ebook introduces kids to different cultures around the world. In addition to having the printed book in its entirety, each page offers tapable elements that show more educational material. Be Global also presents its content in two languages, English and Spanish, and you can read the book yourself, or have the book read aloud by the app.

Be Global also has a coloring book mode, a journal mode where kids can keep a travel journal, and a lesson plan mode for teachers who want to integrate Be Global into the classroom.

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Thursday’s iBooks 2 update delivered interactive textbooks to the iPad. These books incorporate video clips, moving diagrams, audio commentary, and other new features that exploit the iPad’s touch interface. With a handful of such books already available for purchase from the new Textbooks section in the iBookstore, I decided to take the updated iBooks out for a test drive. What I found were books that feature stunning images and impressive graphics that make traditional printed textbooks feel out-of-date.

What’s available now?

iBooks textbooks are geared for the K-12 grade levels at this point; as of Thursday, the books available in the iBookstore are specifically aimed at high schoolers. Apple says it’s working closely with major textbook publishers Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to bring widely used textbooks to life through this new format. Those three publishers account for about 90 percent of textbooks sold in the U.S., according to Apple senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller.

Pearson has two titles available for purchase (covering biology and environmental science, respectively), while McGraw Hill has five—for physics, chemistry, algebra, geometry, and biology. For elementary-school aged kids, DK Publishing has three textbooks available. These companies already have more textbooks in the works.

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Speaking at a press event at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Apple executives showed off a new version of the iBooks e-reader app optimized for electronic textbooks as well as iBooks Author, a Mac program that can build those textbooks. In addition, Apple is taking its successful iTunes U lecture series and turning it into a mobile app aimed at including a complete set of course materials, not just lectures.

“We’re so proud to take part in anything that can help students learn and achieve greatness,” said Apple senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller, adding that education is “deep in Apple’s DNA.”

To that end, Apple outlined two initiatives on Thursday, aimed at reinventing both textbooks and curriculum. Not coincidentally, those initiatives center around Apple’s iOS devices, with particular attention paid to the iPad.

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As executives were outlining Apple’s education initiatives Thursday morning, the company also took care of a little housekeeping, in the form of an iTunes update that lets users sync newly available interactive textbooks between their computer and iPad.

Thursday’s introduction of iBooks 2 during Apple's education-centric press event introduced multimedia-rich books that feature images, databases, videos and 3D models alongside traditional text. Those books are now available from a new Textbooks section of Apple’s iBookstore.

iTunes 10.5.3, also released Thursday, allows users to download those books from the iTunes Store on a Mac or directly from the iBookstore on an iPad, syncing them to the Apple tablet.

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