Two do not disagree about the importance of reading and its role in the advancement of individuals and societies, yet hardly two differ over our neglect of it and its pioneering role. Because of this importance, companies played their winning game: They produced e-readers! This step has achieved tremendous success for companies in two ways: the first is to attract readers who are serious about electronic reading and its advantages that are not allowed for them to read paper books, the second way is by attracting non-readers to read through technology that takes a large part of the lives of the masses, especially young people.

With multiple electronic readers starting with Rocket eBook Submitted by B&N 1999. Through Sony readers and the most popular Amazon reader Kindle And even those Built on Android systemsThe wars of these devices have started on a lighter level than the war for smartphones, especially since it is almost confined to new users who ask a question: Which readers are better? Then, e-reading began to sweep away from traditional reading For the first time in history, e-book sales exceeded sales of paper books And this success went to Amazon.

In these situations and for several reasons, most notably keeping up with the information explosion, tablet devices came as a strong competitor to e-readers, and although they are not intended for reading, they have shown an amazing advantage, helped by the presence of applications in an advanced way than those in e-book readers or that do not exist at all. Amidst this revolution in the e-reading process and the associated devices, books, publishing houses, readers, authors, and companies, Apple released the iPad, which changed the concept of the tablet and presented it creatively. And as always with success stories, it took Apple some time to establish itself in this market.

So how did Apple make a tablet a unique book reader and the ideal choice for millions of users around the world? The beginning of the iPad's success in this area was the presence of an Apple book-reading application integrated into an online book store: iBooks Which was for epub books and then enabled it to browse pdf. These are the most prominent additions made to iBooks:

  • Support picture books
  • The ability to organize PDF books into groups
  • View and browse books that contain audio and video files
  • The ability to listen to the book's content
  • Print PDF books via AirPrint

After this quick overview of the features of the iBooks application in terms of reading, we move to the application store and we find that:

  • It contains nearly 200,000 books
  • It contains the New York Times bestseller list
  • Over 130 million books have been sold so far

After the achievements made by Apple with iBooks and its store, it has taken a more advanced step, which is to provide a store for magazines and newspapers, where the applications were collected inside it and this is what will be available Newsstand. And don't miss Pixar's latest marvel The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore It is an application and provided it on the iPad. This marvel is like an interactive book, and interactive books seem to be in fashion in the coming years, and here is the first of their daughters: an application on the iPad.

Perhaps it is striking when we talk about the iPad that we address this trend that companies are taking to create reading applications on the iPad even though they have e-book readers (such as Amazon that sells Kindle, Barnes, and Noble that sells Knock). This places the iPad as one of the best reading devices, although it does not target it directly as mentioned. Thus, we find that what distinguishes the reading experience through it is the presence of several stores for several companies containing thousands of publishing houses and millions of books, in addition to the iBooks application and store.

Let's go back to Apple and the corporate investment point for reading. Application companies earn billions from Apple customers using these applications, so what will Apple do in front of all these temptations? Apple earns little from what these companies earn (for store-based reading apps). In the latest agreement issued by Apple to developers, it directed a clause for book applications, in which it said that it would not allow the existence of external purchase links, meaning that the purchase process must be made from within the application and without going to the Safari browser. And so the application disappeared Google Books From the store, whose absence caused a wave of questions that did not subside until the application returned to its place and with a new update, the most prominent of which is the removal of the icon for the move to Safari to complete the purchase of books.

It is worth noting that the rest of the companies She updated her apps (Kindle, Kobo, Nuke) to meet this requirement. But Apple did not stop there, which seems a bit negative, as it returned to take advantage of a feature In App Purchasing Which you launched earlier. This feature enables users to subscribe to what the applications offer them from within the application itself, such as subscribing to a specific application to follow up on magazines and newspapers, so that the application is free, but obtaining some of what it provides is through subscription and monthly or annual payment as required by the application. With this, we reach Apple's latest investment in the e-reading market, which is its requirement to obtain 30% of the price of every book sold within these applications (this includes subscriptions as well).

This is how Apple's investments and achievements continue, and this puts us in front of the truth of the importance of this market and the extent of the desired benefit from it. Perhaps we are seeing the initiatives of publishing houses and Arab companies to invest in this field despite the presence of several Arab attempts that we talked about previously In this article However, it is still not enough.

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