eBooks which behave like apps

[Tom]

eBooks are written in HTML, so someone who has learned CSS and HTML can produce an eBook. There are free eBook authoring programmes. Some are open source, like Sigil (http://code.google.com/p/sigil/), and Apple is giving away iAuthor (http://www.t3.com/news/app-week-ibooks-2-and-iauthor-launched-wikipedia-for-android), which only lets you create eBooks for Apple products. Or you can do it with Adobe's InDesign 5.5. To see what can be done with interactive publications see this video http://www.t3.com/news/app-week-ibooks-2-and-iauthor-launched-wikipedia-for-android.
iAuthor looks good but you can't use it to put the results anywhere but the Apple book store - and they might refuse to stock it. Not for me! InDesign can do it in an easier way, if you are familar with Photoshop and the interface, and you can publish to ePub, Apple or Kindle format. See this attractive video http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-indesign-cs5/create-more-compelling-ebooks-with-indesign-cs55/

[Tom]

Al Gore has been on the board of Apple for years and he has done a FANTASTIC eBOOK. See a video about it here http://pushpoppress.com/ourchoice/

[Priscilla]

Just downloaded the Our Choice app - it is brilliant. Very inspiring to think we can write apps like this using html & css. I have InDesign already too, so will have to look into the potential there.
Thanks.

[Tom]

I am looking forward to too, but am sure that, as with websites, easy things are easy, difficult things are difficult and near-impossible things are impossible.

[Tom]

Here is another amazing example of an illustrated eBook http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rnh8V7AIS7Y. It is an iBook and it was submitted to Apple as an ePub file. Note that if you take a file called (eg) mybook.epub and change the file name to mybook.zip, and then extract the contents of the zip file, what you have is a very simple html file with a style sheet and links to images etc. As you can see, the creative opportunities in eBooks are in many respects greater than those of websites. Also, the rate of eBook growth is now, in percentage terms, much faster than than of the web. Also, for content providers, the revenue from eBooks is much easier to grasp than that of websites. A novel with a single text flow is very easy. The big snag is that designing anything more than a text flow eBook is, to put it mildly, a total nightmare. At least this is how it seems to me. For more info on illustrated eBooks, also called fixed layout eBooks, see:
http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Fixed_layout_ePub
And for Elizabeth Castro's comment, see http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2011/02/fixed-layout-epubs-for-ipad-and-iphone.html (see writes books on HTML and on eBooks with InDesign).

[Priscilla]

As you can see, the creative opportunities in eBooks are in many respects greater than those of websites.
It looks like they are, although I guess css and javascript is always evolving to enable us to do more and more. Also, although eBooks are interactive, they don't enable web 2.0 forum/blog type interaction.


Also, for content providers, the revenue from eBooks is much easier to grasp than that of websites.
Yes - eBooks do seem to solve the issue of compromising by monetizing content by advertising / site membership, etc.


The big snag is that designing anything more than a text flow eBook is, to put it mildly, a total nightmare.
That's a shame - it sounded as if it might be quite do-able for someone like me with a few html, css and InDesign skills - have you tried it then?

[Tom]

Yes, I am working on an eBook. Text-only took 10 minutes to convert to ePub. I am now working on an illustrated version and think I have found a way of inserting images, without excessive pain, by using a 'blog format': alternating widths of image and text with no fancy stuff and only two tiers of header tags. As a child, I had a much-loved history book with half-pages of illustration and half-pages of text. Same idea (getting older without growing up is quite possible).

[Tom]

Last year, before the launch of the Kindle Fire, Amazon's share of the eBook market rose from 50% to 60% and Apple's share fell from 30% to 20%. Only 50% of iPad owners use them to read eBooks and those who do are increasingly buying them from the Kindle Store. The explanation is not hard to find: Jeffrey Archer's latest novel The Fourth Estate sells for £7.99 on iBooks, £5.70 on Kindle or £5.24 in paperback. The differential between paperbacks and eBooks is explained by (1) the publishers, Agency Agreement, which lets them hold up prices to protect paperbacks (2) there is VAT on eBooks but not on paperbacks. Also, there are far fewer books in the iBookstore.

The really amazing things, to me, are (1) people are willing to pay more for eBooks than 'dead tree' books (2) the publishing industry can be such total clods. Everybody knows that eBooks are vastly cheaper to 'print' and to distrubute. By inserting their heads in the sand the publishers are behaving like lemmings AND ostriches. Authors will just cut them out of the loop. Would you rather have a 10% royalty from a major publisher or a 70% royalty from Amazon? Give me time, and I hope to make up my mind on this trikcy sum - the delay is only because I do not make much use of a calculator these days.