Apple Reveals the Next Chapter for iBooks & New Chip for iOS Devices
Last week the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals one of the next chapters for Apple's iBooks. For children's books, Apple has devised a number of new gesture options to make reading more fun and interactive.
Context & Ripple Effects
This filing extends a pattern Patently Apple has tracked since early 2010, when Apple published new touch-screen technology ahead of the iPad launch, followed by granted patents on the iOS virtual keyboard and Cover Flow in May 2011. The through-line is Apple staking out its touch-interaction vocabulary in public patent applications well before products ship.
The timing matters because it lands mid-cycle on iOS 5: Apple has just seeded beta 3 to developers along with matching Xcode builds and an iTunes 10.5 beta required for syncing, so gesture additions for iBooks read as part of the same software generation rather than a standalone research curiosity.
First-order effects
- Children's book authors and publishers building for iBooks gain a documented set of gesture primitives aimed at making reading interactive, signaling that Apple wants richer kid-focused titles on the platform.
- The published application puts competitors and app developers on notice of Apple's claimed territory in book-specific gestures, the same disclosure cadence Apple used before the tablet shipped.
Second-order effects
- Interactive children's apps already selling well in an ecosystem where Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster reports users are buying 61% more apps and paying more per app now face native iBooks features competing for the same parent spend inside Apple's own store.
- Publishers weighing dedicated kids' apps against e-books get a reason to standardize on iBooks formats if the gestures become platform conventions, shifting development effort toward Apple's reader.
Third-order effects
- If Apple keeps converting interface filings into shipped features, patent publication becomes a reliable leading indicator of iOS direction — which raises the stakes of portfolio plays like the $4.5 billion Nortel wireless-patent purchase by Apple, Microsoft, RIM and three others announced the same week.
- Reading interfaces drifting toward media-specific gesture languages points to a longer-term split between generic touch conventions and proprietary interactions each content category must license or design around.
The trend: Touch interfaces are evolving from universal tap-and-swipe conventions toward gesture sets patented per content type, with children's books as Apple's latest testbed.