Thread: Electronic Publishing and iBooks

I just finished watching Apples Education press conference/announcement and came away really impressed. Despite several questions/issues with licensing, distribution, and file format, their new authoring program, iBooks Author, could be a real boon.

Why?

It supports tables!

Now I just downloaded the app to my Mac and started playing with it. Has anyone else delved deeper into it yet? It would seem that Gaming books would be relatively straight-forward for this app to handle.

SDLeary

Speedy second impression...

Its PDF export is poor when viewed in Acrobat Pro X; looks fine in Preview. At least it was when I exported one of the built in templates.

And, cannot seem to find a way to start with a blank page.

SDLeary

And then there's this:

Apple's Mind-Bogglingly Greedy and Evil License Agreement

Originally Posted by Vile

Apple's Mind-Bogglingly Greedy and Evil License Agreement

Combine that with SOPA or PIPA (a good description here) and other similar developments; what could possibly go wrong?

Originally Posted by Vile

And then there's this:

Apple's Mind-Bogglingly Greedy and Evil License Agreement

I fail to understand what Apple is aiming at. It seems to me that Apple attempts
to prevent the distribution of the content in an Apple format by any other publi-
sher, but I very much doubt that any other publisher would accept the content
in an Apple format anyway, because other publishers would expect the authors
to provide the content in their preferred formats.

Yes, hence the licensing and distribution questions issues I mentioned in the first post.

On the other hand, if used to produce non-commercial or free items, you don't even have to go thru their ecosystem.

SDLeary

Originally Posted by dragonewt

Combine that with SOPA or PIPA (a good description here) and other similar developments; what could possibly go wrong?

Shelved! At least for now (or again?!).

SDLeary

Originally Posted by rust

I fail to understand what Apple is aiming at. It seems to me that Apple attempts
to prevent the distribution of the content in an Apple format by any other publi-
sher, but I very much doubt that any other publisher would accept the content
in an Apple format anyway, because other publishers would expect the authors
to provide the content in their preferred formats.

They seem to be trying to follow the same format that they did with iTunes. We will honestly have to see how that turns out, though they do seem to have three major Textbook publishers on-board, or have at least convinced their CEOs enough to interview for the Apple produced video shown at the event.

Until the licensing and distribution issues are ironed out, its certainly not going to be relevant, save for small independents. What I'm more interested in at the moment are the capabilities of the iBook Author program itself and what that could show us is actually possible with the (psudo) ePub format that Apple has presented. InDesign has decent capabilities, but even it has to be tweaked somewhat after export.

I would love a more open distribution scheme and ePub3 export. To be fair though, I'm not aware of any readers that support ePub3 yet.

SDLeary

IMO there's alot wrong with iBook Authors there are getting nearly no coverage:
1) You need a mac to run iBook Authors. So your limiting your pool of who can create one. I don't care how good it is, Plenty of people will never trade in their computers for a Mac.
2) I don't hear of any talk of being cross platform. So they're shutting out Android users, despite Android having a larger share of the market currently and its only getting larger.
(there's more but these are the big 2).
The only real advantage that I can see this surviving any real length of time is that Apple/iphone users spend more on their computers/phones than PC/Android users.
But if apple doesn't fix the two big problems, there will be an open source version of it that will be cross platform, both to create and to read. And that will dominate the market.

Originally Posted by dmccoy1693

IMO there's alot wrong with iBook Authors there are getting nearly no coverage:
1) You need a mac to run iBook Authors. So your limiting your pool of who can create one. I don't care how good it is, Plenty of people will never trade in their computers for a Mac.
2) I don't hear of any talk of being cross platform. So they're shutting out Android users, despite Android having a larger share of the market currently and its only getting larger.
(there's more but these are the big 2).
The only real advantage that I can see this surviving any real length of time is that Apple/iphone users spend more on their computers/phones than PC/Android users.
But if apple doesn't fix the two big problems, there will be an open source version of it that will be cross platform, both to create and to read. And that will dominate the market.

Well, yes. Apple is not producing their app for Android. Neither are they producing it for Windows. Unless they get a groundswell of requests (the way they did for iTunes after the iPod was released) I don't see them producing one. Just as I don't think MS would produce their eBook production app for OS X or Android/Linux.

What I'm interested in is the fact that we now have a consumer level app that can produce very good looking, INTERACTIVE books. This can seriously improve the ability of the small publisher who doesn't have the time or ability (read cash) to learn InDesign, Quark, or all the HTML5 stuff that can enable this. In InDesign for example, in order to handle the format shift of a tablet, the layout guy has to do two different layouts, substantially increasing the cost of any given project. iBook Author seems to take care of that. And, I imagine that someone in the Linux/Android camp is now working on a similar project. MS will probably have something in the next six months to a year.

Now, Apple does have to take care of the potential licensing issues as listed in the EULA. Unless authors and potential authors cry publicly about this though... very loudly... nothing will happen.