Ibooks

Marvel comics has just pushed out a large set of their collected editions to Apple's iBookstore. The contents is what you're typically find in their softcover trade paperback editions, and mostly more recent fare, but there's some great stuff included.

Apple is reportedly planning a redesign for the iTunes Store and App Store for sometime later this year.

Apple has sent out a letter via its iTunes Connect portal to all of its registered iBookstore content publishers advising them of some much needed improvements. The iBookstore will now allow publishers to submit screenshots of their books but even more importantly, they can now generate and issue promotional codes for any content sold in the iBookstore.

There's an interesting debate taking place about the merits and virtues of modern electronic books like Apple's iBooks or Amazon's Kindle books and their traditional counterparts -- old fashioned paper bound and proper.

They're qualitatively different, inarguably. The feel of board and cloth and leather is warm and textured compared to the crisp coolness of glass, aluminum, and plastic. The gentle sound of pages flipping is vastly different than a tap or swipe or click. The sharp smell of a fresh new novel or musky scent of an old tome exists in a different dimension from the relative sterility of chips and displays.

Yet the weight, permanence, and nostalgia of traditional books can be a disadvantage when it comes to carrying them, correcting them, and moving the state of the art of knowledge forward once again.