Since Apple's education platform announcement of

1. Sold only through iBookstore, yes. If you give it away for free, you can give it away free anywhere.

2. It'll have to be proven that Apple will enforce this. You can use iBooks Author to create your work, export it to a universal file, then sell it elsewhere - then see if Apple will do anything about it. That would require them being able to determine that your exported file contains in it some info that identifies what software was used to make it, info that you can't remove. Data that you can't remove from a universal file such as raw text or PDF? If you can't do that, you probably shouldn't be using sophisticated software to create your work.

3. Most importantly - If you were intending to sell your work through anywhere else, why would you be using iBooks Author in the first place? The entire appeal, at least its unique functionality, is that it wallows for dynamic multimedia that is exclusive to iBooks. If you were going to create fragmented versions of your content that have platform exclusives, you might as well just kick your customers in the balls. If anything, you'd be using iBooks Author intentionally to sell your content through iBookstore. If you didn't want it to be exclusive, then use a universal format and sell it through normal channels. Amazon already has a self publish platform for Kindle, and I'm sure there are others for Nook and everything else. This sentimentalization of Apple's distribution model is moot.

Common misconceptions of iBooks Author: http://venomousporridge.com/post/16178567783/common-misconceptions

It's no secret that I love phones to the point where I'm collecting them now. I have two lines of service and use them to alternate getting a new phone every year. To counter my aging iPhone 4 and replace my ancient Moto Droid, I've gotten myself the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for Verizon. So far, I love it. But loving the Galaxy Nexus is like loving a beautiful super model. She looks great, but is so thin, she's difficult to hold without feeling like she'll slip through your arms or get crushed in your manly grip. 

Even though I dual wield an iPhone 4 on AT&T and just replaced my OG Droid on VZW with the CDMA Galaxy Nexus with LTE, it was hard to break the instinct to grab my iPhone. I had to force myself to leave what I’m comfortable with and make sure I forced myself to fully explore the phone. I left my iPhone at home for a week and made the Galaxy Nexus my daily driver, solely relying on it to get me through each day. This is what I noticed.

Design

My main complaints are mostly all physical. The large surface area of the phone mixed with the thin profile makes it difficult to hold (compared to a more natural cupping of a round backside - that's right, I said it). The phone itself is slightly curved concave as a way to tout Samsung’s curved display. The large display means that with a typical "monkey grip", you're not likely to be able to reach the far corner with your thumb, making this a two handed phone for anything more than simple browsing. That makes sense for some people to naturally use a smartphone with both hands, but we all have scenarios where it would be nice if our grip hand could manage the whole phone (commuting, walking, driving where legal). That said, should you want to reach the far corner with your thumb single handedly, you turn the phone and cup the thin edge, putting it in a perilous position. The phone's design makes it dangerously smooth and subject to slipping out of your hand. I'd say get a silicone case for grip, but I'd wait until one accommodates the an extended battery should you need it. Plenty of companies will be making cases, especially with CES 2012 here. If you’re unimpressed with the bland grey color scheme, you can wait for the recently announced white version that will start shipping soon, but so far it’s just the GSM version.

Display

The 4.65" display is gorgeous, especially for a PenTile. While we've seen bad Pentile implementation on phones like the Droid RAZR, the Galaxy Nexus doesn't suffer the same woes. The high density of the pixels makes them almost indistinguishable, which makes for clear images and impressive color. It still has a slight discoloration when viewed from an angle, but you likely won’t be doing that. Something to remember is that the display will likely be the most power hungry factor in this phone, with the highest brightness attributing to upwards of 50% power usage. Definitely be smart and use auto brightness or keep it at 50% until you need it brighter.

Sound

Knowing that smart phones have become the de facto music player for many, phone maufacturers have put the headphone jack on the top so the user can still look at the screen properly (you can't rest a phone on a surface standing up if the headphone jack is on the bottom edge). I don't know about you, but I frequently put my phone in a cup holder and don't like the idea of putting it upside down just because the headphone cable is coming out the wrong way. If I had to choose a single physical detriment that could hinder a common use case for smart phones, it would be the speaker. The single (possibly stereo, can't tell) speaker is questionably located on the backside, at the bottom. The speaker isn't that strong to begin with, certainly nowhere near close to the iPhone (relative to size), but remember that something else goes along the bottom of the backside - your hand. Why on earth would designers put a single speaker grill right where your hand is? It makes it impossible to hear anything while you hold it. Even then, I've listened to music at full volume with the phone face down on my desk and felt like I was nowhere near "11". There’s really nothing that will make the speaker work any louder short of external accessories.

Battery

The phone comes with an 1850mAh battery, which seems ample enough by today's standards, but the larger display, multitasking OS and optional LTE radio usage will consume that power very quickly. On launch, Verizon was already selling a first-party 2100mAh battery for $50 and immediately discounting it to $25 by day two (so if you paid full price for it, call Verizon immediately and have them credit your account). For the price of a nice lunch, you can get yourself a bigger battery that could make the difference between your phone dying before leaving work and making it back home at the end of the day. In my conservative tests with LTE disabled, I made it 24 hours on a single charge with the extended battery. For those with LTE service available, this is a blessing and a curse. LTE can definitely nab you insane speeds, like the 17mbps down, 10 mbps up I got in the road between Ames and Des Moines. But it absolutely destroy your battery. To give you an objective power usage example, I left the phone in my hotel while I was staying in the Milwaukee area. It was 100% charged when I left, so the meter started when I unplugged it. I returned about 5 ½ hours later to see 8% power remaining. I had just powered the phone on before, so I know the only apps I had running were my widgets for GMail, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Google Reader. That actually is a lot to keep running, but without the display running at all, no Wi-Fi, and no calls, iit still would have been dead from virtually zero usage in 6 hours. The lesson here is that if you plan on using LTE, you better be plugged in. Some reports even say that heavy usage with LTE enabled drains the battery faster than it can charge.

OS

ICS is definitely a step up from the Froyo I'm used to and doesn't feel like it needs any mods at the moment with all its monitoring utility. You definitely need to get used to the change in manipulating apps and widgets, and of course the control buttons being "displayed" instead of being static. It's neither better or worse than iOS, and I say that as someone who uses both phones daily, which is about as objective as you can get. Would I recommend it over an iPhone? Depends on the person, of course. It's definitely the best Android phone on the market (with some very close competition from other Android devices), but you have to know that you want iPhone over Android. There's no point in telling people what they want if you are just going to tell them what you like. What I can say is that I would never question anyone buying an iPhone. They're either understand it immediately or in a short amount of time. I would question someone blindly (meaning never used a smartphone) buying any Android phone and recommend they use it before buying. Then again, anyone buying the Galaxy Nexus is buying because they know they want it, especially if they're buying unlocked for GSM (fully compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile services). For Android enthusiasts who are up on modding, CyanogenMod 9 is almost done and the available builds work on the Galaxy Nexus.

I can't speak to the call quality, since that's mostly a VZW issue and I'm probably in a bad place (AT&T has better coverage in every regard here, but that's subjective and useless in a review).

Anyone who has lived with me (you lucky few) can attest to how many package deliveries I get. It's unreasonable. I do almost all my shopping on Amazon, from media to clothing, not to mention orders from various other merchants. The UPS guy is at my door 1-2 times a week.

UPS has always provided shippers with a way to manage all the packages they send out. Merchants and other business absolutely need this to ensure timely delivery of their goods. But there's never been a good way for recipients to track all their incoming shipments. Collecting all your active tracking numbers and plugging them into the UPS site each time just isn't good enough if you have to do it all the time. GMail actually uses its ad space to provide an automatic link to a shipment tracking page if it detects a tracking number for UPS, FedEx and USPS. That's actually one of the types of ads that I don't mind. Plug the shipping company all you want below the link, but providing me with that helpful information makes the process much faster for me (iOS Mail app does this too).

However, this doesn't escape the major issue for someone who needs timely deliveries: signature releases. Even if the sender (ie, Amazon) doesn't require a signature for the item (ie, Spider-Man: Edge of Time), it's up to the driver's discretion to leave it or not and instead leave one of those awful slips on your door. But those paper slips are about to go the way of the dinosaurs.

UPS has finally answered my prayers with My Choice, a free (with paid extras) service that where you can register your name and address(s), so your driver will know to leave it without signature. It's a permanent whitelist. The more advanced features are rerouting packages in transit if you realize you are not at home, or having UPS hold until a certain date. This is certainly not for everyone, especially since most people live in houses and/or get deliveries without signature all the time. But for apartment dwelling folk, who try to race home or watch the online tracker show they're already too late, this is a godsend.

Just a word of warning, setting this up requires verification of identity. It doesn't require any super sensitive information, but will use your provided name, address and phone number to cross reference with any existing data they have accumulated on you. It's certainly understandable that they want to make sure no one is trying to intercept someone else's packages, but the data they have on us is scary. They will ask you to correctly answer three multiple choice questions about you, such as "What is a street you have lived on?" or "What is a phone number you have used?" Where would they get such information? From past deliveries to people with similar info, especially if you have ever shipped using UPS (eBayers, they will probably have lots of info on you). But it's not as alarming as it seems at first, just answer the questions and you're confirmed. You can now add tracking numbers to your profile for future checking and even label them so you can tell them apart.

If you regularly receive UPS shipments and paper slips are a problem for you, you should check this out. If you are concerned with "the man" knowing more about you, then I suggest not using delivery services.

UPS My Choice - warning, only link I know about is for registration. Don't know the easy way for existing members to log into their dashboard.

As an long time Audible user, only briefly a subscribing member, I've grown accustomed to audio content and have accumulated over 15 solid days of audio books, plays, and other pieces. While there are many outlets for obtaining digital audio material, not to mention physical, one major selling point of Audible's format was native support for Apple's iTunes and iPods. While Windows Media Player required additional software to recognize it, an early deal made Apple's ecosystem a no brainer.

Because of this inherent compatibility, Audible content could always be easily transferred to iPhones to be played with the iPod app (renamed "Music" in iOS5). There was nothing wrong with this way of playing content, however, Audible wanted to bring more to the experience. It took Audible until 2010 to release an iPhone app to buy, download, and play content within the app, but that first option was short lived (more on that later).

Upon its initial release, the app was designed to rely on iOS 4's new features, such as app multitasking. It was intended to replace the playback functionality of the iPod app, which would provide achievement stats such as "hours listened" and reward with badges (which are only stored within that copy of the app, there are no global stats). The ultimate downside to this feature over a year after its release is that it Audible lacks any social networking for users to associate with other users and compare each others' libraries and reading achievements. Let's get this out of the way - Audible sucks at engaging its customers and allowing them to engage each other. For being a book retailer, it fails to grasp the notion that reading is a collective experience and isolating us slows down discovery. For God's sake, people don't have book clubs for the fun of it! You expect people to gather at their local Borders to... oh wait. Anyway, back to the main topic.

Although I'm just going off memory, I want to say that the Audible app was originally unable to play content in the background, which meant if you wanted to browse the web or use any other app that allowed background playback, the playback would immediately terminate when you closed out the app. For me, this meant launching the app, playing the book, then using some other device to do what I wanted... or I could just transfer the audiobook from my computer directly to my phone's storage and let the iPod app use it. If I wanted to earn those achievements, I could let the Audible app discover it - another feature that I never saw work until now. With October 10th's v1.7.1 release, I'm seeing a lot of the promised functions work as intended, with one exception. Audible completely removed any ability to shop their catalog within the app. I honestly can't remember the app ever having "in app" purchases, but I think Audible tried to circumvent Apple's 30% commission by launching a web browser within the app and having your buy from their mobile site. As fun as it is to shop online with a 3.5" touch screen, I would sooner just go to my computer and make the purchase, then get the content to my phone. Now it seems that pressure has forced Audible to remove even that, allowing you to create a link on your homescreen to their site.

This is where I have to say that stupid business decisions hurt consumers. Trust me, I get it, 30% is significant and Apple (as well as Google, RIM, and other mobile market platforms) should lower that to 15-20%, but if I can't easily make purchases on the spot (read: impulse purchases), then I won't make them at all. Just accept the loss in order to make more sales. More sales are more important than more revenue, because sales lead to repeat sales, which leads to more revenue. While angling iTunes as a competitor to wipe out illegal music downloading, Apple quickly realized that giving people an absurdly easy way to buy content with the push of a button will facilitate more sales. Hell, I was buying $2 comics off the Marvel app until they jacked prices up to $4 each. Whoa, stop the show. Without knowing how much of Audible's "sales" are actually made with subscription credits (has to be significant), shouldn't they be able to get away with members "purchasing" new content with their pre-paid credits within the app? It's technically a $0 transaction at that point, so Apple can have 30% of that all they want. Sure, it only benefits people with credits (Gold and Platinum subscribers), but to play Devil's Advocate, sounds like a great incentive for people to start subscribing! Now to be as fair as I described, Audible loves trying to keep its customers with incentive deals. If you try to cancel a subscription, Audible will likely offer you a discount on 3 months or a free credit. Just be prepared if you try to cancel after accepting a courtesy once or more - they make you call in to cancel. Almost makes the "I'm unhappy with Audible" reason redundant.

Here's the announcement that was emailed to Audible users the other day, hardly sympathetic from their perspective. While I praise Audible, I will always follow up with the caveats that come with their ecosystem.

We'd like to update you on a change to the Audible application that affects the way that you access the Audible mobile store. In order to comply with recent policy changes by Apple, we've removed the "Shop" link from within the app that opened your web browser and took you to the Audible mobile store.

You can still shop the mobile store, and we've created a "Shop Audible" icon that you can add to your home screen so it's always one click away. To do this, launch your web browser on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch, go to mobile.audible.com, and follow the instructions to "Add to Home Screen". You can watch a quick video to walk you through the steps, or call us at (888) 283-5051 if you have any other questions.
   
    1. Click to bring up options. 2. Click on [no really, it just ends there, completely blank]   
   
That's it. The link is gone, but everything else is the same. You can still shop the store, and all your books will still be available in the app.

Thank you,
The Audible Team

There's no point in my writing this, since it's not to break the news or to say something that hasn't been said already. But because the world has essentially stopped for a moment, I might as well take the time. Steve Jobs passed earlier today and that left a huge emptiness in the technology community. He may not have been the man of the people, but he was a genius. He stood on the shoulders of giants and was behind technology that changed the world.

He wasn't an engineer. He wasn't a designer. He was a business man. His business was to assemble the best people in the business, make them build the best product they could make and make people want it. Apple has always been a company that makes a product with a combination of form and function that you've never seen before. Someone may make a beautiful product, someone else may make a powerful product, but Apple balances the two and gives consumers an experience they've never had before. That was Steve's goal. It wasn't about being first, it was about being the best. If you couldn't give him your best, he didn't want you. He expected nothing less than perfection and drove his teams hard to get it. It was about taking others' poorly executed plans and showing them how it should have been done. He wanted a product that could be used by everyone, from less fortunate to politicians, the disabled and the independent.

There's so much about Steve Jobs that most people don't know or wouldn't recognize from his jean and turtleneck appearance. He was a vegan hippie Budhist rock star. He attributed his "out of the box" thinking to dropping acid and fought criticism with high brow sarcasm. Following an very premature obituary release in 2008, Steve opened his fall keynote with the Twain quote: "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." When he formally introduced the iPhone 4 in 2010, even though Gizmodo had thoroughly scooped the device early, he told the audience to stop him if they had seen it before.

What amazes me about him was that he was a magnificent hyporcite. Steve was a mad man. He challenged authority and became the single unchallenged authority. He broke the rules and made rules that could not be broken. He competed with the slogan "Think Different", yet cultimated the mentality of Apple addiction. He would claim that Apple would never make something, then make it. He commanded an unparalleled respect from the public. He controlled his public image and created the hype that Apple is famous for. He was Apple. No company founder or CEO will ever be revered as much as him. The impact on the news circuits was immeasurable.

Steve knew his time was coming to an end and put all his ducks in a row before he left Apple. He was a master strategist who saw a much bigger game board than anyone else. I have no doubt that many of the products in Apple's near future will still have Steve's fingerprint on them. A light that burns twice as bringht burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly, Steve.

Sent from my iMac