“Apple’s iBookstore on the forthcoming iPad is set to get larger. The company has just signed a deal with the largest distributor of independent publishers to sell electronic versions of it books on the new device,” Motoko Rich and Brad Stone report for The New York Times.

“Perseus Books Group, a large independent publisher that also distributes works from 330 other smaller presses including Grove Atlantic, Harvard Business School Press, Zagat and City Lights Books, signed a deal last week with Apple, following five of the six biggest publishers that have already signed agreements with Apple,” Rich and Stone report. “Perseus’s deal comes as Amazon.com, the largest online seller of printed books and the biggest e-book seller in the United States, has put pressure on publishers who have not yet signed deals with Apple to refrain from doing so. Amazon, which makes the Kindle e-reader, holds about 90 percent of the e-book market.”

Rich and Stone continue, “With Apple’s iPad coming on the scene, Amazon is fighting to keep as much of its market lead as possible.

“Publishers have provisionally welcomed Apple’s entry into the market because Apple’s deals allow publishers to set consumer prices, within limits. Publishers have had no control over consumer prices at Amazon, which has generally sold new releases and best sellers for $9.99, a price that publishers feared would erode profits in the long term,” Rich and Stone report. “Like the five other publishers who have already signed with Apple, Perseus will set consumer prices and Apple will serve as an agent, taking a 30 percent commission on each sale. E-book versions of most newly released adult general fiction and nonfiction will cost $12.99 to $14.99. All publishers whose books are distributed by Perseus will be allowed to opt in to the deal.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“According to an email just sent out to devs, Apple is now accepting iPad application submissions through iTunes Connect. You can submit your application today and ‘receive feedback’ on its ‘readiness for the grand opening,’” Erica Sadun reports for TUAW.

“Simulator-only apps developed with the iPhone SDK 3.2 Beta 5 can be submitted as of today for initial review. Upload your apps by 5pm, Saturday, March 27th, and the App review team will e-mail you with submission feedback about the readiness of your application for App Store distribution,” Sadun reports. “You will also receive information about submitting your apps for final review, before the iPad ships and (for most of us) before we even own hardware.”

Sadun writes, “If you’re thinking about waiting: don’t. Apple states that ‘[o]nly apps submitted for the initial review will be considered for the grand opening of the iPad App Store.’”

More info in the full article here.

Apple’s ‘Meet iPad’ [TV ad] had a pretty strong week with 2.4 million views, good enough for No. 2 on the viral chart. Why? Well, intense interest in the product, obviously, but also a shift in Apple’s strategy, which we also noticed last week,” Michael Learmonth reports for Advertising Age.

“Apple has had a YouTube channel since 2005, but only recently started using it. In the past, they’d focused on driving views on Apple.com, but for the iPad, they allowed the video to be embedded across the web, and views were distributed across 100 different placements, according to Visible Measures,” Learmonth reports. “Apple turned off commenting on its own videos, but a robust conversation bloomed around copies. Interestingly, this posting, with 2,422 comments as of this writing, was most-viewed; Apple’s official version was a distant second.”

Direct link via YouTube here.

Learmonth reports, “The most-viewed spot this week is a video that’s been hanging around the list since the Super Bowl, but got some extra juice from controversy. E-Trade was slapped with a $100 million lawsuit for ‘Milkoholic’ by Lindsay Lohan, and the surge to more than 3 million views.”

Full article, with the full list of “The Most-Watched Viral Video Ads from Last Week,” here.

“Since the iPad became available for pre-order last Friday, Apple has sold hundreds of thousands of the device, say people familiar with the matter,” Yukari Iwatani Kane and Sam Schechner report for The Wall Street Journal. “One of these people said Apple could sell more iPads in its first three months than it sold iPhones in the three months after the smart phone’s debut.”

“The company is still negotiating with media companies for a price cut on TV shows that people can download onto the device, said people familiar with the matter,” Kane and Schechner report.

Kane and Schechner report that “nailing down the content has proven difficult as some potential collaborators weigh the advantages of working with Apple against the potential threats to their current sources of revenue, these people add… The last-minute discussions show the complexities that Apple and Chief Executive Steve Jobs are facing in creating a networked multimedia device, which has pushed the company to pare back some of its initial intentions for the iPad’s release.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“After an initial flood of pent-up demand and some ups and downs over the first weekend, pre-orders for the iPad tablet computer are now averaging 10,000 per day, according to Daniel Tello, a Venezuelan blogger-analyst who writes about Apple using the pseudonym Deagol,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “‘I think sometime during Friday, perhaps before noon, the counter should roll to 200,000 units pre-ordered,’ he told Fortune.

“Tello’s tally does not include iPads reserved for pick-up at Apple retail stores on April 3, the day the device goes on sale,” Elmer-DeWitt reports. “But according to the Boy Genius Report — citing its ‘Apple connects’ — Apple’s 222 U.S. stores took an average of 700 reservations that first weekend, which would suggest that reservations and online orders are coming at roughly the same rate.”

Elmer-DeWitt reports, “If true, the total number of iPads reserved or pre-ordered in the first week may be close to 400,000.”

Full article here.

“Judging from the order numbers, pre-sales are coming in at the rate of 25,000 per hour,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt blogs for Fortune.

“The folks who hang out at Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity Board are too impatient to wait for Appl to announce sales figures; they much prefer to work them out on their own — in real time,” Elmer-DeWitt reports.

“Entering the order numbers associated with their own purchases on a Google spreadsheet, they think they’ve cracked the code. As of 11:05 a.m. ET — two and a half hours after Apple’s online store began taking pre-orders — the group had received 15 confirmations with order numbers as high as 74,000 (the numbers don’t necessarily start at 0),” Elmer-DeWitt reports. “’51,000 orders in two hours,’ announced Victor Castroll shortly after noon. He’s an analyst with Valcent Financial Group and an AAPL Sanity member.”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“The Apple iPad has been available for pre-order for more than 24 hours now. Initial demand seems promising, although not everyone has embraced the concept of dedicating $500 or more to be an early adopter of a device that nobody really has all the details on just yet,” Tony Bradley writes for PCWorld.

“Not to sound like a broken record, but the iPad is a consumer device. Actually, as far as I am concerned anything with an Apple logo is–by default–intended primarily for a consumer audience,” Bradley writes. “Despite the passionate zeal of the Apple faithful, you won’t see any Fortune 500 companies lining up to dump Windows-based PC’s for Macs, or BlackBerry smart phones for iPhones any time soon.”

Bradley continues, “That said, the iPad–and other Apple devices–can be more than functional business tools as well. The following is a selection of apps that business professionals can use to transform the media-consuming toy into a productive business tool:”

• Salesforce Mobile
• Meebo
• Freshbooks

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews