The latter part of the announcement covered the impressive expansion of iTunes U and the launch of iBooks Author, a DIY tool for publishing digital textbooks. If anything could pose a threat to the status quo in the textbook industry, it would be such an application. But wait. As it turned out, the so-called "Garage Band for e-books" wouldn't be quite as open and revolutionary as some thought.

So what's the big deal? The agreement contains a provision stating that "if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple," and then proceeds to outline further limitations on the paid distribution of one's e-books. So much for iBooks Author being a groundbreaking, industry-shaking move.

As troubling as the iBooks Author EULA looks, it's questionable whether or not the agreement can be legally enforced under current copyright law, explains Philadelphia-based lawyer Max Kennerly on his blog.

The issue, says Kennerly, comes down to the difference between exclusive and non-exclusive licenses. Apple seeks to establish an exclusive license with users, in which, by legal definition, "the copyright holder permits the licensee to use the protected material for a specific use and further promises that the same permission will not be given to others. The licensee violates the copyright by exceeding the scope of this license."

A provision in the Copyright Act requiring a written "transfer of copyright ownership" may serve as an unintended legal loophole for those seeking to go around Apple's restrictions and selling their e-books.

Explains Kennerly:

In the end, the iBooks Author EULA leaves both Apple and the author in a strange stand-off: Apple doesn't actually have the right to tell the author not to take their work somewhere else, but the author can't do that without breaching the EULA -- even though they retain full rights in their copyright.

Of course, this is just one legal expert's interpretation of the legal niceties, based in part on somewhat obscure concepts and court-established precedents. Still, on paper it would appear that the legal enforceability of the iBooks Author EULA isn't entirely clear, and this may leave the door open to authors brave and curious enough to find out.

Driven in large part by the proliferation of tablets and e-readers, digital book lending is on the rise, according to OverDrive, a leading supplier of digital content to U.S. libraries. The company, which partnered with Amazon for its Kindle lending program, reported recently that it saw a 130% increase in traffic to its "virtual branch" websites last year. OverDrive works with 18,000 libraries to offer e-books and other digital content to members.

The Kindle Fire may not be an iPad killer, but it sure is mimicking Apple's early tablet sales growth. The device was the top-selling item on Amazon over the holiday season, with its e-ink counterparts not too far behind.

Mobile devices like tablets and smartphones have played no small role in the growth in library lending of e-books. OverDrive reports a 22% increase in traffic from such devices. In total, traffic to the company's virtual branches double from 2010 to 2011, to 1.6 billion page views. In addition to iPads and Kindles, the OverDrive borrowed e-books were accessed from Android devices, Nooks, iPods, Windows Phone and Blackberry smartphones, and the Sony Reader.

Portland, Oregon iOS developer Dan Wineman calls it unprecidented audacity. Writer Ed Bott calls it "mind-bogglingly greedy and evil." I just find it very, very sad.

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:

(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or
service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.

The tension between the creative potential enabled by this kind of software and the crushing authoritarianism of the conditions it's shipped with is remarkable. Professional cynic Paul Carr says that's just how Apple rolls; he says we'll complain and then we'll genuflect and then we'll like it.

The multimedia interactivity of a self-published multi-touch tablet-dwelling learning experience formerly known as a text book ought to be set free to do its work - the elevation of the human condition! The web is a read/write miracle, not a read/write with permission test of aesthetic and commercial purity. It's a new world where people often give freely of the value they create in the knowledge that the aggregate results will enrich everyone. Maybe that's Wikipedia more than it is Apple though.

Is this what the world is to come to? To a clean, crisp, cold beauty of high-end consumer goods that promise to empower but only under the watchful eye of the world's most profitable corporation? Why does it have to be this way, Apple?

See also former RWW writer Audrey Watters at HackEducation: Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-Revolution

Today, the company set their sights on textbooks, an industry Steve Jobs himself described as being "ripe for digital destruction." True as that may be, is what Apple planning to do in the space really all that disruptive?

If the company's efforts are going to help revolutionize textbooks and education, it's going to be some time before that happens, and they're not going to do it alone.

Costly and Not Cross-Platform

Apple released the second version of its iBooks app for iOS today, which includes access to the new textbook titles. One thing the company did not announce is that the app is coming to other platforms. Granted, the iPad is still the leader of the tablet market, but Android is slowly catching up and Amazon just released a device geared toward content consumption that costs less than half of the entry level iPad. And it's growing fast.

Of course, Apple ultimately wants to sell more of its hardware, but if it really wants its textbook initiative to truly take off, it will have to develop apps for other platforms, just as Amazon has done with its Kindle apps.

Another barrier to widespread adoption of this model is the cost of the iPad. It starts at $500, which is not something every American family can afford, especially with an economy in flux. With hundreds of "pages" of content, 3D interactive graphics, embedded video and other bells and whistles, we have to imagine these books aren't particularly light on file size. As the books accumulate over time, alongside other content stored on the iPad, the 16 GB entry level model may no longer cut it, making it an even more expensive investment.

Not Aimed at the College Market (and Did We Mention the iPad is Expensive?)

The cost issue might be mitigated somewhat if the initiative were not targeted exclusively at high school students.

At least for the time being, Apple's digital textbooks are targeted primarily at high school students. That fact alone presents a few roadblocks to the initiative being truly disruptive. For one, not every high school student in the United States can afford a $500 tablet device. Apple may well end up dropping the price when they launch the iPad 3 in a few weeks, but even then we're probably still talking about a several-hundred-dollar gadget. Many middle and upper class families can afford that, but kids in inner city schools and other low-income areas, some of which can barely afford enough paper textbooks, aren't going to be learning from iPads anytime soon.

For college students, investing in an iPad or similar device to replace textbooks makes simple economic sense. A single semester's worth of textbooks can easily approach the cost of an iPad. If the e-books available on the device are drastically less expensive than their paper counterparts, it would be foolish not to make the digital switch. Of course, how dramatically prices would drop remains to be seen.

Apple is Partnering With Big Publishers, Not Killing Them

College textbooks are enormously, obscenely profitable for the the companies that print them. In fact, they've come up with all kinds of creative ways of milking more money out of students. Textbooks about ancient history will be revised and re-issued every other semester and the company will package supplementary CD-ROM's and other digital learning materials, using them as a justification to jack up the price.

To get its new initiative off the ground, Apple is partnering with major publishers like McGraw Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. For the high school market, perhaps those companies can afford to agree to a $15-per-book price tag. But when it comes to higher education, publishers are unlikely to allow a $180 biology print textbook be replaced with a $15 e-book. That would cut into their profits pretty dramatically. At the same time, interactive e-textbooks can't be resold once they're used, so perhaps the publishers can be convinced that their e-book revenues will be replenished on a semesterly basis without fail.

Interestingly, at the same time that Apple has unveiled major partnerships with textbooks publishers, it also unleashed what appears to be a powerful, easy-to-use publishing toolkit for producing those books. If independent authors manage to create enough competition, it's possible that bigger publishers will have no choice but to play ball with Apple's preferred pricing for textbooks.

Apple's Not the Only Player

There's little reason to doubt that a decade from now, the classroom and the tools in it will look very different from what students are accustomed to today. The textbook is indeed one of the educational tools that is most in need of a digital makeover. When paper textbooks are finally a thing of the past, it won't have been Apple's efforts alone that got us there.

For one, education is already being blown wide open by the Web. The mere concepts of "the lecture" and "the textbook" begin to look antiquated in light of things like Khan Academy, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, iTunes U and MIT's Open Courseware.

Those examples are just the tip of the iceberg. You'd be hard-pressed to find a student in the U.S. today that isn't already using the Internet to supplement their educational experience to some extent. Apple is well aware of the changes that are already underway. That's why they're doing this. That's why their DIY publishing tools include the ability pull in pieces of the Web and incorporate HTML5 and JavaScript.

Apple is also not the first company to try to re-imagine the textbook for a digital world. The so-called "smartbooks" offered by e-textbook startup Inking are in some ways more advanced than what Apple is bringing to the table. Other companies already active in this space include Chegg and Kno, as Audrey Watters points out on Hack Education.

Indeed, Apple is anything but the first entrant into this space. Not that that's stopped them in the past.

Lead textbook photo by Stephen Cummings. Phil Schiller photo courtesy of The Verge.

A startup called Coliloquy launches today to bring that concept to the e-book market starting with four titles. They're young adult romance novels, each written by an established author who took a bet with this new format. These teen fantasy stories will be a testing ground for whether interactive texts could be a new frontier for all kinds of publishers.

E-books have not quite reached mainstream ubiquity, but this past holiday season was a big one for the e-ink Kindles that Coliloquy supports. Coliloquy's timing is good, and its proposition is interesting. In the e-book era, a user-controlled storyline offers more than just deeper engagement. It provides feedback to the publishers and authors, so they can better tune the product to their customers.

Coliloquy enables episodic content unlike anything previously available on the Kindle. It's more democratic. Authors can adjust their future offerings based on what they learn about their audience from the choices they make. It's in-story analytics. And the readers get the satisfaction of influencing the outcome not just of one story but of a whole series.

A Writer and An Engineer

Coliloquy co-founder Lisa Rutherford says most of the other innovation around e-books is toward a more Web-like, multimedia experience. She'd rather stay focused on expanding the possibilities of text narrative. "What is a book?" she asks. "What goes on inside it?" She has a background as a writer, and her partner, Waynn Lue, is an engineer. They're able to work with both the technical and narrative challenges posed by this idea.

Rutherford thinks "it's a shame that, with the rise of digital fiction, innovation around the content has not kept up with innovations around the delivery." Coliloquy will "take away all the constraints" on the notion of the book, she says, establishing "communication between the author and the readers."

Active and Interactive

Coliloquy currently supports the Kindle Touch, basic Kindle and Kindle Keyboard models. It's also testing on the Web, iOS and Android, including the Kindle Fire and Nook. Kindle development is slow going. Coliloquy is in the Kindle Developer Program for Active Content, and Amazon delayed its release several times, even though the company was ready.

It's early days on this platform, but the potential is interesting, and Kindle is the right place for Coliloquy to be. These young adult romances are a good starting point, but the format could be expanded to all kinds of genres. Think about non-fiction. Imagine what long-form journalists or academics could do with this kind of feedback. Publishing articles could become a sort of Ask Me Anything thread. Here's my report. What should I investigate next?

Coliloquy is a bold use of Kindle technology, but I'm more intrigued by its implications for storytelling itself. "This isn't about replacing books," Lue says. "It's about expanding the canon." That's a noble objective. E-books free authors and readers from the constraints of the page, but they can also retain that comfortable format. Authors and readers who prefer linear text are not threatened by the e-book age. But for those who want to experiment, Coliloquy wants to make that possible.

You can learn more about Coliloquy and its current authors and titles, as well as the submission process for new authors, at coliloquy.com.

Amazon increased its monthly funding for KDP Select from $500,000 to $700,000 this month after the strong showing. KDP authors earned $1.70 per borrow. The top 10 KDP Select authors saw a 30% increase from lending on top of the royalties they earned from sales of the same titles. Amazon's end-run around Big Publishing shows promise for authors.

The Kindle Lending Library itself launched on November 2. It's available to Amazon Prime members. It has tight restrictions - users can only borrow one book per month - so 295,000 titles in one month means 295,000 people.

For authors in the KDP Select lending program, the numbers are great, but Amazon is characteristically cagey about other specifics. It won't share the exact size of the sales bump KDP Select authors got over non-lending KDP authors. It doesn't disclose how many books were lent in the Lending Library program overall.

The biggest bugbear of them all for Amazon reporters is the specific number of Kindles sold. Amazon will report percentage growth in Kindle sales, but they never disclose exactly how many devices are in people's hands. Still, we know this: 295,000 or so people borrowed Kindle books from independent authors last month, and some of those authors made lots of money.

Do you have an e-reader? Which one? Do you read on it often?

The story plays out as a hybrid of a film, a book and an interactive game. Kids can just watch it unfold the first time, skip around with the page arrows, or crank a mighty gear to jump to their favorite parts. Moonbot co-founders Brandon Oldenburg and Lampton Enoch described the process by which they, along with co-founder William Joyce, create their stories, and its as charming a story as The Numberlys itself.

Moonbot works off a slate of stories, choosing a medium to start with and then expanding the story to different platforms. The first story app, The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore, was a short film first, which Moonbot then extended to be an iPad app, and a printed book is coming this fall. For The Numberlys, the iPad version came first, and the film version is now in production. "We approach all of these stories this way," Enochs says. "The Numberlys will also be a book at some point." Moonbot's process revolves around the stories themselves, bringing them to the media that make the most sense for the audience and the particular story.

"We take all the things we love, stir it up into a pot, and hopefully it takes," Oldenburg says. "With Morris Lessmore, it was Singing In the Rain meets Buster Keaton with a little bit of The Wizard of Oz." This formula helps Moonbot's stories appeal to all ages. "For an older user, there's a nostalgic quality," Oldenburg says. "For a younger user, it's just pointing them towards this wonderful reference and inspiration that they might not experience nowadays."

Creating The Numberlys

The follow-up project began with the concept for an alphabet book staring these five characters, the Numberlys. The creators asked themselves whimsical questions like, "Who came up with the letter G?" The story would invent answers to such questions. As a side effect, Moonbot would get the chance to make an alphabet book.

"Alphabet books are a right of passage for a lot of children's book illustrators," Oldenburg says. "One of the things on our checklist is always to do an alphabet book." For Moonbot, entertaining, engaging stories are the priority, but educational themes manage to sneak into them.

"We didn't really jive well with school," Oldenburg says. "The teachers we got along with were the art teachers." As Oldenburg spoke, the lyrics of part 2 of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" jumped to my mind. The opening sequences of The Numberlys, with its strange automatons marching in lockstep, evoke scenes from the 1982 film based on the album, The Wall.

With the Numberlys idea already cooking, there was a screening of Fritz Lang's landmark 1927 sci-fi film Metropolis in Moonbot's home town of Shreveport, Louisiana. The look and scope of the film became the inspiration for the soaring, black-and-white urban dystopia in which The Numberlys is set. Throw in some Marx Brothers and sprinkle some Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, and that's The Numberlys' gritty, charming universe.

Oldenburg says the iPad was an ideal place to start with this story. The Moonbot team draws on a mixture of experience from computer-generated animation, television and film. The iPad's approachable nature adds the potential of interactivity, allowing The Numberlys to draw in its users with 18 little games interspersed within the story.

Oldenburg and Joyce also decided to frame the story in the iPad's vertical orientation, a more book-shaped than screen-shaped window into the world. "It's a fun aspect ratio to work in," says Oldenburg. "It really helps make it look grand and tall. It helps accentuate the scale."

"It was very fun but also very challenging," Oldenburg says. "Now, taking it out as a short film, what we're going to have to do is vertical letterboxing. We're calling it 'the world's tallest short.'"

Blurring The Line

After Morris Lessmore, people tried to define Moonbot's genre. Moonbot has to choose a category in iTunes, and the best fit is the "Books" category. But as Oldenburg says, this is a bit of a hack. "There are two book categories in iTunes. There are the ones that cost a lot of money, which are basically PDFs, and there are the ones that don't cost a lot - which are really hard to make - which are the interactive ones."

The Moonbot team's set of skills does not fit in these constraints. The creators have settled on "story app" as the best way to describe the versions of their stories that run on Apple's iOS. But as a result of Moonbot's process, these stories stretch outside the confines of one medium. As Oldenburg told me, "It feels like we're doing something right when we start to blur lines."

The Numberlys is available for $5.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Apple's in-app purchasing rules prevent e-book sellers from offering stores in their native apps (without giving Apple a 30% cut). The route around that was to include a link to the Web store inside the native reader app. Last July, Apple forced Amazon and other e-reader apps to remove this link, so users of e-book platforms other than Apple's iBooks must buy their books in the browser, in a separate place from where they read.

Amazon's first strike against this rule was to launch the Web-based Kindle Cloud Reader, so that users could read and buy books from the browser on any device, not just the iPad. It's a nice experience, but the native Kindle app's performs better and is more useful offline, even though it doesn't offer direct access to the bookstore.

In December, Amazon brought the Kindle Fire Newsstand to the iOS app, so iPad users could receive subscription publications from Amazon in the Kindle app, in competition with Apple's own Newsstand. After beefing up the Kindle app, the new standalone Kindle Store Web app better serves Kindle users who want to use the native reader instead of the browser-based one.

Apple and Amazon come at each other head-on in this market. Their approaches are basically opposite. Apple wants controls over the media available on its devices, because content is an inclusive service it provides to make its profitable devices more attractive. Apple breaks even on content, but it wants to lock users into its devices with the convenience of that service.

Amazon's business is selling content on razor-thin margins. Its Kindle devices are the service, while the content is the product. That's why Amazon offers so much support for iOS devices, even though it just launched its own Kindle Fire tablet. Amazon loses $2.70 on each Kindle Fire, but it's sure to make up the loss in media purchases. Sales to iOS users are pure profit for Amazon. The new iPad Kindle Store is its best possible solution for its customers allowed on Apple's devices.

Do you read e-books? What's your set-up?

But Google's game is information. That's how Google Books is positioned - not as a content business or a hardware business, but as an information business. Google wants knowledge to be accessible. The Kindle service might be the best integrated with devices, and iBooks might look great on the demo floor of an Apple Store. But as a set of features for an e-book service, I'm rooting for Google Books.

Friendly Formats

Kindle and iBooks are locked down. Their formats only work in their own environments. Google uses ePub and PDF, which means you can get them onto any device, one way or another. To read it on your Kindle, you'll have to settle for the PDF version, but hey, it works. For all the other major reading devices, Google Books will help you get your e-book on there, no matter how hard the device makes it.

Furthermore, Google offers rights owners the ability to license their books under Creative Commons, so the public can share and remix them. And thanks to Google's friendliness around digital rights management, lots of Google Books are free.

Offline Reading In The Browser

There's also the browser option. Yesterday, Google Books gave Chrome users the ability to read offline. The laptop is not the ideal place to read, compared to an e-ink reader or a tablet, which also allow offline reading. But not everyone has the luxury of owning multiple travel-sized computers. The Kindle Cloud Reader is a nice Web view, too, and it has offline reading. There's no denying that Kindle is an awesome service. But Google Books is more compatible overall with the widest variety of devices, and now it has this feature, too.

The Whole History of the Written Word

Google's mission is to catalog the world's information and make it searchable. That's why Google digitizes books in the first place. In true Google form, users get free tools like the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which lets us search the whole history of language. Google Books contains over 10% of the books ever published, dating back to 1400. That means, when you search the Ngram Viewer, you're getting a sizable sample of humanity's linguistic history.

Check out our post from after the launch of the Ngram Viewer to see how cool this book search tool is. And nobody but Google could build this on top of a book platform. Google Books may not be the snazziest e-book service, but it's the one with the right philosophy.

Do you read e-books? What services do you use, and what devices do you use for reading?

If indie authors are willing to sell their e-book exclusively through Amazon for 90 days, those books become available through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. Each time a writer's book is loaned through the system, they get a cut of revenue on top of the royalties they get from book sales.

Who Needs Big Publishing Houses?

Not too long ago, the only way for an author to get significant reach and income was to get on board with a major publishing house, no small feat for any author. Today, thanks to the spread of e-books and programs like this, the barriers to entry are much lower and the financial pay-off keeps getting more attractive.

Last year, Amazon increased the revenue share it offers Kindle authors to 70%, likely in anticipation of the launch of Apple's iBooks store.

By offering an extra stream of revenue via KDP Select, Amazon boosts those profits for writers while making its own lending library seem more attractive to them. After all, why participate in a program that doesn't generate any revenue, especially if you're the little guy (or gal)?

Amazon has set aside $6 million for the fund in 2012, but wasted no time getting things started. They've already pledged $500,000 for the month of December.

Last year, the e-commerce giant announced that e-book editions of best-sellers had outsold their printed counterparts on the site for the first time. Then, earlier this year, the company revealed that it had sold more e-books than paperback and hardcover books combined.

Its line of Kindle e-readers was already doing quite well when the company launched its full-color, Android-based media tablet the Kindle Fire. As the holidays approach, the $200 device is expected to land in the hands of many more consumers. On Black Friday alone, Amazon sold 400% more Kindles that it did on the same day last year.

Media reports have pointed to the existence of such an investigation since last year, but yesterday an Justice Department official publicly acknowledged it, saying, "We are also investigating the electronic book industry, along with the European Commission and the states attorneys general." That's right, Europe and a handful of U.S. states are concerned about e-book pricing as well.

Authorities are looking into allegations that Apple took this route as a way of challenging Amazon, which had started selling e-books at prices lower than most paperbacks, something the publishers view as a potential threat to their traditional revenue streams.

Governments weren't the first to raise their eyebrows at the practice. These investigations come after several class action lawsuits were filed against Apple and the major publishing houses for alleged price-fixing.

For publishers, having prices set higher means more than just increased revenue. It helps them delay the cannibalization of print sales, which still make up the majority of their income as less lucrative e-books grow in popularity. For Apple, such an arrangement with the publishers enabled them to launch an e-book marketplace to compete with Amazon and better market its iPad tablet as a device that's ideal for reading and content consumption.

For consumers, however, the pricing model doesn't make as much sense. In many cases, people end up paying just as much for an e-book as they would for a paperback. That doesn't quite add up considering e-books forgo the costs of printing and distributing.

The app was first rolled out for Safari and Chrome in August. It not only makes one's Kindle e-book library more accessible, but allows Amazon to circumvent Apple's controversial in-app purchase fees.

Notably absent, of course, is support for the biggest browser of them all, Internet Explorer. Developing any Web-based application for IE can be a headache, and we can imagine something this complex and functional will take some serious time to be ironed out for Microsoft's notorious but widely-used Web browser. If and when IE support does come, it's a safe bet that older versions will be off-limits, as they are less standards-friendly than their more recent brethren.

In addition to launching a fully-functional Web app built on the latest standards, Amazon has embraced HTML5 more broadly by incorporating it into their new Kindle e-book format, which is used in native mobile apps and on the Kindle devices themselves. Kindle Format 8, which supports many of the tags and properties in HTML5 and CSS3, will be used to render e-books on the new Kindle Fire tablet. Other Kindle devices will then be updated to support the new format as well.

How extensive is the alleged book piracy? Demonoid.me users are said to have swapped copies of Photoshop CS5 All-In-One For Dummies more than 74,000 times, according to the lawsuit.

This is a first for the publishing industry, who are following in the footsteps of Hollywood. Most famously, tens of thousands of users who used BitTorrent to download the widely-acclaimed and award-winning film The Hurt Locker were sued by the film's producers. Many of those defendants settled out of court, as is common in cases like these.

Despite the popularity of legitimate e-book marketplaces like Amazon's Kindle Store and Apple's iBooks, digital book piracy has grown in recent years, with some best-sellers being illegally downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

It remains to be seen how this case unfolds, or if other book publishers follow Wiley in the practice of suing BitTorrent users for copyright infringement.

"It's all about discovery, discovery of ideas, clips, people and other related materials. Over time we hope to conceptually connect peoples' findings to enable discovery," says BetaWorks Founder and Findings.com Co-Founder, John Borthwick. "We aren't collecting what people are reading right now on their devices (e.g. Kindle). We are collecting what they annotate."

Findings is the brainchild of writer Steven Johnson, BetaWorks Founder and CEO John Borthwick and Findings Co-Founder and Developer Corey Menscher.

It all began in 2004, when Johnson wrote a blog post about Devonthink that delved into the idea that eventually became Findings:

"The other thing that would be fascinating would be to open up these personal libraries to the external world. That would be a lovely combination of old-fashioned book-based wisdom, advanced semantic search technology, and the personality-driven filters that we've come to enjoy in the blogosphere. I can imagine someone sitting down to write an article about complexity theory and the web, and saying, 'I bet Johnson's got some good material on this in his 'library.'"

Shortly after that, Johnson wrote an article for the New York Times Books section, entitled "Tool for Thought," which alluded to the idea of better "tools for thinking."

These ideas converged in the creation of Findings.

How the Findings Metadata Works

The metadata from the page is dropped into the data model, placing long-form reading clips into a social context and "giving them that marginalia that we're used to in the real world," says Borthwick. Every clip that someone makes on Findings has its own canonical link.

"We did a first version at BetaWorks three-and-a-half to four years ago, but never pushed out a public version of it," he says. "Four years ago there weren't Kindles or iPads, and ereading was something people were talking about but not doing. So we waited."

In 2011, John Borthwick, Steven Johnson and Corey Menscher finally thought the world was ready for Findings. "People are clipping, finding stuff, the concept of a central repository where you can pull in lots of things you think are interesting clip-wise, and then build a social context around it."

Findings is now live.

The new format moves away from the previous Mobi standard in favor of one that supports many of the rich layout and formatting features of HTML5 and CSS3.

The fact that Amazon is ditching its old format for a more Web-friendly one is a sign that it intends to make the e-reading experience one that's more akin to Web pages in general. The use of CSS3 gives publishers a whole new toolkit for laying out and designing e-books, and one that utilizes the familiar and relatively simple syntax of stylesheets for the Web.

This move makes sense as Amazon gets ready to ship its first full-color e-reader and media tablet on November 15. Kindle Format 8 will land on the Kindle Fire first, and then make its way to the company's newer e-ink devices and third party Kindle apps, such as those found on iOS and Android devices.

Amazon placed its first bet on HTML5 earlier this year when it launched the Kindle Cloud Reader, a Web app that lets customers read e-books in a rich, fluid UI that can be accessed from any modern Web browser.