Some cool facts that book publishers should be made aware of is that there are now 250 million iPads out in the world now. It used to be that you wanted to stretch your reach, you would need to publish on the iPhone to reach the 400 million iPhone users and only 50 million iPad users. But now that we're reaching more and more iPad users, our content won't be compromised. That's great news for us as we try to create experiences only on the iPad that would simply be futile on the smaller screens of the iPhones and iTouches.

The other thing that is very exciting is that Apple has reported that there are now 1,000 schools participating in a program to award one iPad per child  in their schools. So if we continue to provide great content aimed at children, we'll have even more eyeballs directed at our products.

Some other news in the news is Adobe. Back before the Flash debacle between Adobe and Apple, Adobe was creating apps using their software. And then Apple lowered the iron fist on third party software developers and told them only xcode would be allowed to make apps. Well the reigns have loosened and now you'll see more and more companies that are building software frameworks that sit on top of xcode. One of which is a new software title called, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Create single, custom iPad applications for a one-time payment of just $395. Leading publishers and companies are already using Adobe® Digital Publishing Suite to deliver their next generation content—and soon freelancer designers and small design studios can too. Starting next month, create dynamic reading experiences, attract new audiences, and broaden your business capabilities. With new Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition, you can use the classical design qualities of print, add interactivity, and draw on your imagination to develop engaging content for the iPad—all within the Adobe InDesign® CS5.5 software you already know and love. More to come when we hear more about this.

If you don't know by now, we use Corona SDK to build our apps. The first one, My Basketball Stats was built directly in xcode using Objective-C. The last one, "Opening Rome" and the new one, yet to be released, "Hippos Name" was built using a combination of "Kwik" extension for Photoshop and Corona SDK. Both work very well together. Corona gives us the flexibility to create special effects for our app that would have taken months to figure out in Xcode alone. Granted this process isn't entirely easy. We've had some hiccups along the way we hope to resolve soon, so that you can see our great new book, "Hippos Name!"

All in all, it's an exciting time for all of us involved in technology and publishing. We're off to a great start in 2011, and 2012 promises to be even better! Keep coming back for more info. Enjoy!

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