Apple has collected a selection of self-published titles on the iBookstore under a new “Breakout Books” section. The section is intended to give special attention to “emerging talents,” according to Apple, and each is both independently published and highly rated by users. Some are free, most are cheap, and the effort looks like an attempt to remind users that just like Amazon, Apple’s digital bookstore is an opportunity for independent authors to find an audience.

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program has been a big hit for the online retailer. While the effect for self-publishing authors is debatable, there’s no denying that Amazon has added another lucrative revenue stream to its existing deals with established publishing houses through the effort. Individual success stories might still be relatively rare, but Amazon itself is winning out through the cumulative 30 percent cut it’s taking in on KDP titles. Seeking Alpha estimated that Amazon makes around $48 million a month in revenues from the program, or around $10 million in profit to its bottom line. It’s not a huge amount of money, but it’s a growing revenue source where there was none before.

Apple’s iBooks author promised to be an app that would make it easy for authors to self-publish and submit books directly to the iTunes store on their Macs, but efforts to reach out to self-published authors on iBooks haven’t caught on quite as quickly, at least not in terms of mind share with indie authors. Showcasing content from those kinds of creators is a good way for Apple to attract more of that content to the iBookstore, and possibly make up some ground on Amazon in this regard.

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There’s been plenty of buzz about the iPad mini and the potential role in could play in reaffirming Apple’s commitment education, and now CEO Tim Cook is spending some time on stage to discuss the sort of impact immensely-popular tablet has had in schools. After noting that the iPad (and iBooks) has now found a home in 2500 classrooms in the U.S., Cook revealed that a new version of the company’s iBooks Author will be available for free starting today.

Like the iBooks app update before it, the additions here are relatively minor — there are a handful of new templates to choose from and customize, and wannabe textbook creators can now choose their own fonts when laying out pages of text and content. More importantly for the mathematically-inclined is the ability to pop mathematical express and equations directly onto a page without having to cobble them together ahead of time.

Of course, the major draw of iBooks textbooks (and arguably the iPad as a whole) is the sense of magic that comes with simple, thoughtful interaction. To that end, Apple has also fleshed out iBooks Author with support for multitouch widgets, letting readers of all ages dive deeper into their educational content. Cook noted that iBooks textbooks were available for 80% of the U.S. high school core curriculum, adding dryly that it was enough to make you wish you were a kid again. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but there’s little question that devices like the iPad have begun to worm their way into academia in earnest — a prospect that should only be helped by the announcement of the long-awaited iPad mini.

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Sourcebooks, a U.S. book publisher, has used Apple’s iBooks Author tool to launch iPad editions of three Shakespeare plays on Apple’s iBooks 2 store. The iBooks include extra content focused on the history of each play’s performance — including photos, videos and audio clips of readings from various actors, along with study-friendly staples such as glossary resources, note-taking and highlighting features.

The series of iBooks carries the rather cringe-worthy title of The Shakesperience. The three plays in question are: Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. Clips and snippets from different performances and readings of each play are incorporated into the iPad editions, with the aim of engaging readers and students. Audio clips are introduced by actor Sir Derek Jacobi — one of a series of Shakespearean actors featured in the iBooks.

“Teachers tell us it takes three weeks for students to become comfortable with Shakespeare’s language. The Shakesperience is designed to change the way you read Shakespeare,” the publisher notes in its marketing material for the iBooks.

Here’s more from Sourcebook’s blurb

Developed with leading Shakespearean scholars and ideal for students, each Shakesperience play provides special features that enhance the reader’s experience and make it the most friendly and fascinating Shakespeare you can imagine.

“We’ve taken what has traditionally been a difficult and generic experience and provided the opportunity for more engaged and lively learning,” noted Dominique Raccah, CEO and Publisher of Sourcebooks, in a statement. “Experts will love it, but what we’re most excited about is the impact it will have on educators and students.”

Apple’s iBooks Author tool was unveiled in January, when Apple announced a big push on textbooks in its iBooks ecosystem, with the launch of iBooks 2 for the iPad.

At the time we said the iBooks Author tool provides potential publishers with templates to build any type of iBook, not just textbooks. Sourcebook’s Shakesperience is something of a hybrid — you couldn’t really call it a pure-play textbook — suggesting there’s plenty of scope for Apple to continue expanding the number of interactive iBooks for iPad being added to its store.

We’ve reached out to Apple to ask how many titles are available in its iBooks 2 app store and will update with any response.

Apple’s iBooks Author software is designed to make it easy to augment text by adding widgets and other graphical, interactive and multimedia elements via the drag and drop interface. The tool is free to download from the Mac App Store.

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I keep a close and interested eye on the world of ebooks, and I’m pleased to report that it keeps getting weirder. British supermarket chain Sainsbury – who I worked for once, helping to program a new payroll system for a few months, until they scrapped the whole project – recently bought HMV’s share in ebook hub Anobii for a whopping, er, one pound. (Americans: that’s about $1.50.) Huh?

Meanwhile, HarperCollins announced its “HarperCollins 360” global publishing program, which at first I thought was them taking a page from the music industry’s post-Napster ‘360 deals‘ — but no; on sober second thought it has nothing to do with those except for name. Instead it’s an attempt to make all of their English-language books available to all English-language readers. I know, I know: they’re only doing this now? Just as ebook revenue exceeds that of hardcovers? Ah, publishing.

Meanwhiler, Startup Weekend founder and semi-vagabond Andrew Hyde Kickstartered, wrote, and self-published a travel book called “This Book Is About Travel,” and then discovered that Amazon was marking up its digital delivery fees to the tune of an estimated 129,000%. Nice margin if you can get it.

But the rest of us, well, not so much. Here are some cold hard numbers from Amazon for yours truly, for the first half of this month:

That’s after I made a few of my books free for a couple of days under Amazon’s Kindle Select program. Which requires you to publish your books exclusively on Kindle, incidentally. I was content to do, since my iBooks sales were more or less nonexistent — but it’s really unclear how this works with my having previously released all these books under a Creative Commons license. I suspect the notion of authors giving away their books in perpetuity seems so weird to Amazon that it never really occurred to them.

What Amazon thinks matters. They remain the big dog of the book industry. The Kindle has dwindled from a vast majority to a small minority of Hyde’s sales — as he puts it, “Kindle Sales Vanish When Users Know About Their Fees To Authors” — but that’s a special case. With ebooks, at least in the USA, Amazon’s Kindle is dominant and everything else is irrelevant. Which ain’t necessarily so bad; some self-published authors are making a pretty good living off the Kindle ecosystem.

Not me, obviously, but I still find the above chart cheering: close to twenty thousand downloads of my novels Invisible Armies and Night of Knives in two days, with zero publicity. But of course virtually no one went on to actually buy the books. At least I have a lucrative software job; but just so you know, a lot of people who write really good books are in such dire financial shape that they may never be able to afford to take the time to write another..

What irritates me most, though, is that I’d like to make these books available for free forever…but of course Amazon won’t allow it. And again, they’re the big dog. Twenty thousand downloads in two days; that’s more than all my books combined get in a full month on Feedbooks. And I only just cracked Amazon’s Top 40 Free Books bestseller list.

I’m convinced that in the long run we’ll move to business models where paying for a book (or song, or video) is accepted as a) strictly voluntary b) often something you do after reading/hearing/viewing it. For the record, I view this as more inevitable than desirable, but I also think that this will ultimately be good for artists–as long as we can get the reading/listening/watching masses to accept this cultural shift, and to voluntarily choose to pay for the things they enjoy, sometimes after they’ve enjoyed them.

That will not be easy. And it’s not being made any easier by the existing entrenched business models fighting voluntary payment tooth and nail. By doing so they’re inadvertently teaching a vast audience of consumers that paying for books, music, and TV is something you only do if/when you have no choice in the matter. Call me a crazed idealist, but I think that instead we need to convince consumers that they need to pay money because that’s what supports the storytelling they want; and I fear the entertainment industries of the world will eventually find that what feels like hanging on tooth and nail actually means slowly gnawing their own limbs off.

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In what I suspect will be an increasing trend, cartoonist Bill Amend has released three “packs” of his popular FoxTrot comics for the iPad. He built the books by himself using iBooks Author and proceeds go to the Help Bill Amend Eat Food Fund (I suspect).

He’s selling three titles including a special issue — number 3.14 — featuring geek strips. Each book contains 100 strips and is optimized for the new iPad.

Amend is another in the long line of legitimately popular artists self-releasing their work. Jim Gaffigan just released a comedy special on his own and I expect others to give this a try as the means of production is placed back into the hands of the artists.

You can pick up the books in the iBooks store for $1.99 each.

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As I watched Apple’s iBooks event in New York City last week, my mind began to race about the

Apple is making a play for the textbook market with its launch today of iBooks 2 and the new textbooks within that app. It’s Apple, so they are going to reinvent the textbook industry, right?

Well, maybe not today. If you fire up your iPad and update to the latest version of iBooks (Apple’s app for books with its own store separate from iTunes), you can check out all of the new textbooks Apple just introduced. All 8 of them. That’s right, there are only 8 textbooks available in the new format: Two biology books, E.O. Wilson’s Life On Earth, plus one each on geometry, physics, chemistry, algebra, and environmental sciences.

More will be available in the future, no doubt, but 8 seems like a pretty meager number to launch with. The books are also huge files, weighing in at about 1 GB each. One crashed the iPad 1 which I tested it on (that’s what was handy, but even an iPad 1 should be able to handle a textbook, don’t you think?). The textbooks look appealing, with cool interactive features and the ability to highlight passages and take notes, but it’s all pretty standard stuff.

The big question this raises is whether the assembled publishers are taking the iPad seriously as a way to sell digital textbooks or if this is just a test for them. We will find out soon enough as the number of titles grows. It needs to be in the thousands, and then tens of thousands, very soon for this to make a difference.

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Buying a digital book for your iPad is a very odd experience. If you fire up iTunes, you can find music, movies, apps, even audiobooks, but there is no category for digital books. You need to first download the iBooks app, and then buy books within that app. So it is like a marketplace within a marketplace that also happens to be a reader. The Kindle app also works that way. It is confusing.

But if you go into the App Store, you can find a whole category of iPad apps which are books. Many of them are interactive and tend to be children’s books like Green Eggs And Ham ($3.99) or Miss Spider’s Tea Party ($7.99). Increasingly, more and more books will end up in the App Store for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is simply because apps are more interesting.

If a book publisher wants to add any features beyond what is available in iBooks, including adding informational apps, links to the outside Web or sharing excerpts with friends on Twitter and Facebook, they are better off publishing the book as an app. Startups like Rethink Books (which I covered yesterday) are developing software platforms for publishers to do just that—turning books into social apps.

Right now, books remain somewhat hidden in iTunes. There is no clear book category up top, other than audiobooks, among the main media types. You have to dive into the iBooks app or find book apps in the App Store. But if Apple is serious about making the iPad a book reading device, it should make it a little easier to find all the books that can be read on it in one place.

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Books are becoming electronic like every other form of print media, but they still lag in their social skills. A startup called Rethink Books wants to incorporate sharing features into every electronic book and turn them into social books. I caught up with founders Jason Ilian and Jason Johnson today at the TedxEast conference in New York City, where they presented a demo f their yet-to-be-released product. I caught up with them in the hallway and got a quick demo which I captured on video.

What CEO Ilian is showing is an iPad app, but this app could work on other devices, including e-readers. You see the familiar bookshelf with your books, but you can also connect with your friends on Twitter and Facebook and within the Social Books app itself to see what books are on their bookshelves. As you read a book, you can highlight and create notes, as well as see the highlights and notes of your friends (in different colors). Excerpts could be shared via Twitter or Facebook with a link back to an excerpt page, along with a link to buy the book. There is an activity stream view, where you can see all the comments and recent reading activities of the people you follow.

We’ve seen some of these concepts before. Digital comic book app Graphic.ly comes to mind.. And even the Kindle allows some sharing via Facebook and Twitter. But nobody has really turbocharged sharing for electronic books yet.

Rethink Books isn’t necessarily going to solve the problem, but at least they are approaching it in the right way. The company is approaching publishers who want to put out electronic book titles as individual apps, and Rethink is hoping to power the social sharing features of those books. If Apple and Amazon decide to open up their electronic book marketplaces, they could create a book reader for the their digital books as well.

It seems unlikely that Amazon or Apple would ever do that because they want to control their respective digital book markets and offer a consistent experience. In a way, these social books remind me a little of Shelfari, the social reading service Amazon bought two years ago. But why isn’t that built into the Kindle by now? Maybe opening up digital bookstores to outside innovation isn’t such a bad idea,

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Starting today, O’Reilly Media will be selling some 600 titles in Apple’s iBookstore, along with almost 150 more from (yes, ironically) Microsoft Press, whose books are sold and distributed by O’Reilly. The iBookstore is of course included in the free iBooks app for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch (iTunes link).

For now, the availability of O’Reilly and Microsoft Press titles is limited to the United States and Canada, however.

The titles from O’Reilly include Jeff Potter’s Cooking for Geeks, David Pogue’s iPhone: The Missing Manual, J.D. Biersdorfer’s iPad: The Missing Manual, and Mark Pilgrim’s HTML5: Up and Running. Definitely sounds like something for the iOS device carrying developer crowd.

Perhaps less so are the titles from Microsoft Press, which include Steve McConnell’s Code Complete, Second Edition, Ed Bott’s Microsoft Office 2010 Inside Out, and William R. Stanek’s Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant. Although I’m sure those will look awesome on the iPad as well, and it obviously makes a lot of sense for Microsoft Press to get its titles distributed on as many platforms as possible.

Worth noting: since there’s no DRM on ebooks sold by O’Reilly, it’s easy to read titles purchased from the iBookstore on nearly any device with ePub support.

Andrew Savikas, VP of Digital Initiatives at O’Reilly Media, has blogged about the announcement as well and says the company intends to make the full catalog of titles from O’Reilly, Microsoft Press, and all of its digital distribution clients available in every territory with an iBookstore.

Savikas also points out that, as a solution for the fact that iBooks does not support updates for ebooks, each title includes information about how to upgrade one’s purchase with oreilly.com for $4.95 in order to gain access to additional DRM-free formats and free lifetime updates.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch