It is pretty clear by now that Apple’s iWork (s aapl) productivity suite is an acquired taste. But soon, folks who are interested in publishing their content in the ePub format — an open eBook standard — might just develop a taste for it. Apple today released a new update to the iWork suite that makes it simple to export documents in the ePub format, allowing them to be read easily on Apple’s iBooks app for iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.
In the early days, iTunes was a way to manage music libraries and for music playback. Over time, it became a standard digital music player, which helped with the sales by the iTunes store. In a similar vein, Apple is trying to get more folks to use its iBooks app, betting that it could become the de facto reader for electronic documents that are encoded in ePub or PDF formats. More usage would help drive visitors to the iBooks store.
Earlier today, Mathew wrote about people reading more with e-readers. Clearly, Apple is locked in a battle with Amazon (s amzn) for mindshare, and for now, Amazon is winning. Yesterday, Amazon said that its new lower-cost e-readers were selling like hotcakes. The ePub format is a competitor to Amazon’s proprietary Kindle-related format, and the support for it in iWork could help give Apple a leg up.
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Yeah, but… I wonder what Adobe did to piss off Apple so much that they want to overtake every aspect of their market (Acrobat).
It’s almost all consuming and a bit dirty on Apple’s part. A pile of young graphics people have invested their careers in learning Flash and other Adobe products, now find themselves in the lurch. Is the browser experience on the ipad and iphone better with no Flash? Couldn’t there be a compromise, pls? Inquiring minds want to know.
Too many things to list but just three…
1) With their big apps (Photoshop, etc), they held way back and didn’t update the apps for OSX native code. They were one of the longest holdouts.
2) They never optimized Flash for the Mac. Flash on the Mac is unlike Flash on Windows, it’s a total resource hog.
3) Related to #2 – Here three years after the iPhone was introduced, Adobe still doesn’t have a Flash player for mobile that isn’t a battery killer or as robust as the desktop.
There’s very good reasons Apple doesn’t get along with Adobe – Adobe probably wouldn’t still exist if Apple hadn’t adopted Postscript for desktop publishing.
Postscript License
Font License (ATM vs TrueType)
DPS (Display Postscript) License
independent PDF graphic engine in Mac OS X
Creation of Carbon and Lack of support Cocoa
FinalCut Pro vs. Premiere
Aperture vs. Lightroom
iPhoto vs. Photoshop Elements
After Effects vs. Motion
.
.
.
Flash is dead technology, there
are a lot of technology that Apple has
killed that messed with people’s livelihood.
When Steve Jobs went to Adobe ten years ago to get Adobe on board with Apple’s new OSX, Adobe basically told Jobs to take a hike. Well, he’s still hiking and it isn’t in Adobe’s direction.
yayer. reading on the 4 is seamless.
“selling like hotcakes”
Amazon keeps being cute in their description of sales – What does this even mean? Are they selling like hotcakes at my local Legion pancake breakfast or like pancakes at iHop?
Come on Amazon, cough up some numbers already.