David Sparks:
I just spent several hours playing with iBook Author’s media tools inserting movies, keynote animations, and interactive pictures into my new secret project and it ruined me. There is no turning back. As an author and a reader, I will never look at a static page e-book the same. While for some types of books, like novels, words on a page are fine, for a lot of books the failure to include media just became inexcusable.
I’m now considering outsourcing all of my thinking to David because his entire post sums up my own impressions of Apple’s Education Event.
When I first saw iBooks Author, I went through the usual initial emotional paralysis experienced by any geek as I virtually elbow-checked my way to the front of the Mac App Store line.
But then I started thinking bigger picture. If it succeeds, iBooks Author represents the first layman’s tool for creating a kind of new composite media that’s likely to become a dominant artform this century.
The marketing emphasis with iBooks Author is clearly on textbooks, but more generally, iBooks Author is a tool for blending previously siloed media into a single thing.
The “open” internet today is rich with media, but they mostly stand alone. And e-books are honestly just glorified pictures of their paper ancestors locked behind glass. iBooks Author may change all of that.
Want to quote something someone said on a podcast? Don’t transcribe it—losing tone and inflection. Drop in an audio snippet.
Trying to describe a highly technical workflow or build a software manual? Why not put a screencast on the page instead bloating the book with unnecessary words?
Would pictures and screenshots tell a story better? Embed a gallery.
Books, particularly technical and educational books, are going to get both shorter and richer at the same time. And anyone will be able to make them.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I too dived into the pool as soon as the iBooks Author became available and was extremely excited by the prospect of the ease of self publishing. After a couple of hours of banging into the buggy software I feel I will probably be waiting for the software to mature some more.
I put together a simple 2 chapter book using text from one of my web sites and added a couple of images and I also put in a short video that was made in Motion 5 and I got frustrated at the number of times the iBooks app crashed on my iPad 1. I don’t don’t yet know where the problem is. Whether it is in the authoring software, iBooks or that it is not the best to run on the iPad 1.
I tried the proofing mode from the app and also with exporting the book out to the ePub format and sending to the iPad and had crashy results with both options. Seeing as I was using one of the templates that came with the app and was not doing anything wild and strange with it as I wanted to just test it quickly with a basic book, it was disappointing to say the least.
Since the iPads came out, I’ve been looking for an excuse to get one. Alas, every rationale disappeared when I said the dread words, “But I can do that with my iPhone, and I always have it with me.” Grrr!
Not so anymore. Now I gotta get one so I can use that nifty publish to iPad (live) function. “Hey, I gotta see what I’m publishing don’t I? I wouldn’t want to disappoint my customers.” That and the fact the Scrivener has an iPad version under development have me watching for a good deal on an iPad.
My little publishing company has a two-foot-high stack of print titles whose formatting in complex enough that they can’t be reproduced digitally by any sane process until iBooks Author came along. Now only those books with endnotes are still out in the cold. “When will Apple add endnotes to iBooks Author?” I ask myself. Hopefully soon.
For a year and more, I’ve been complaining and carping that Apple wasn’t giving Amazon any real competition in the ebook market. Thursday, that all changed. Now Amazon needs to get hustling and come up with a similar publishing tool. We have what we’ve long needed, a competitive market.
–Michael W. Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien
It gets worse. I was about to start a project to create a photo book of my grandkids, just as I’ve done many times before. Now I’m wondering why I wouldn’t create an interactive book to include not just stills but slide shows and movies.
Truly transformative