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iBook Lessons: Folium Book Studio
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. I was recently contacted by the developers behind Folium Book Studio. Folium offers a web-app based alternative to iBooks Author, allowing you to build EPUB and Mobi titles. They also can export HTML to support print-on-demand services. Paid projects stay on the site and are archived. You can return and edit at any time. Free projects expire at the end of three weeks, at which time you lose edit capabilities. By upgrading to a paid project (US$30), you regain that access. Free projects are purged from the site after three months. In addition, you can bring your own ISBN or buy one from Folium for a $10 fee. The tool imports most standard formats including .doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt, and .html. During import, their proprietary Folium TypeProof™ tool examines the documents and makes typographic corrections, such as fixing straight quotes, spaces between sentences and paragraphs, and so forth. You review these fixes to decide whether the tool has processed these properly. You're then presented with an interactive Table of Contents, which you can tweak as needed before proceeding to the content editor. The content editor allows you to provide text-level edits, as you'd expect from a standard writing tool. Upon completing the manuscript preparation, you can choose one of many themes. As with all ebook preparation tools, the style sheets lets you focus on relative layout particulars so your formats will be visually pleasing on a variety of ebook readers. Book Studio offers a wide range of styles, offering a robust selection of book elements. Working with images feels a lot like working with WordPress galleries. You can import your own or take advantage of a range of royalty-free stock images provided by Folium. The tool supports standard wrapping, scaling, and captioning. The Folium Cover Designer™ helps users create covers interactively. You can preview your titles online or export them to supported formats. This feature is supported during the three week trial period, so don't feel that you must pay in order to produce an ebook. You can set all your necessary metadata using the site's interactive overview. An optional $30 proofing overview will preflight your book on six key devices, including the Kindle, iPad and Nook. The service reviews your table of contents, page formats, and overall readability. For $30 per title, Folium Book Studio may be a bit pricey for those comfortable with standard Word, Pages, and iBooks Author tools. For those who have the money to spend, and aren't familiar with these tools, it's certainly an option you can explore. Test the tool for free for three weeks per title.
iBook Lessons: Can an iBooks-only strategy work?
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. One question I keep encountering is this: "If iBooks Author is so great, can I make enough money selling only through Apple and only to iPad owners to stay in business?" The answer to that is that results will vary. Can you add enough value in an iBooks Author presentation to justify leaving out a large segment of the ebook market? Using proprietary formats, the iBooks Author app allows you to lay out your books and add custom elements in ways that go well beyond the EPUB standard. Your books look exactly as you intend them to; you can build interactive widgets that leverage the power of HTML and Javascript for new kinds of interaction. This extended standard means that iBooks Author excludes Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook platforms, and it also cuts away anyone who might purchase and read your ebook on an iPhone or iPod touch. iBooks Author in its current state is Apple only and iPad only. [Note that you're free to repurpose your text, images and other content for those other platforms if you want to build Kindle/Nook-friendly editions. The iBooks Author licensing agreement says you can't sell the output from iBooks Author anywhere but the Apple iBookstore, but your content is yours and you can use other tools to build for other ebook platforms. –Ed.] That's not the entire picture, however. For some authors, specifically those creating highly-interactive titles, their choice hasn't really been about Amazon-or-iBooks, since standard EPUB represents a fairly static output technology. Their decision is more about choosing between an iBooks Author ebook versus a custom, standalone iPad app. I have encountered book creators who have gone in both directions. iOS development house Tapity chose to go iBooks. Founder Jeremy Olson told me, "To build an interactive digital book, our choice of platforms was really straightforward. Kindle doesn't yet allow the kind of rich interaction that we were looking to build so it was really between building an app versus building an iBook. When iBooks Author was announced in January, the choice was a no-brainer: It's pretty simple: cost to build, time to build, price you can charge, and less competition." Tapity's first entry to this field was Cleaning Mona Lisa. An interactive iBook, it introduced readers to painting techniques and the need for restoration. Host Lee Sandstead offers a series of enthusiastic lectures about the topic through embedded videos. Interactive widgets guide readers through virtual "cleaning" exercises, revealing the hidden colors and details hidden by the debris of time. "As a team of creatives, building Cleaning Mona Lisa with iBooks Author cost us next to nothing but our time," Olson said. "Just a few thousand dollars. I expect building an app with the same kind of user experience could have cost us close to a hundred thousand dollars to contract out the programming. This makes building iBooks far less risky than building apps." He pointed out how effective this choice was. "Programming a project generally consumes half or more of the development time. With iBooks Author, we design it and it's done (apart from just a few small HTML 5 widgets we had to program). This also cuts out the process of designing something in Photoshop and exporting it for use in an app." Going iBooks also helped sustain the book's bottom line for sales. "With apps, $2.99 is a premium price. With books, folks expect to pay more and so $2.99 was an extremely reasonable starting price for our book. With future books we think that we can even charge much more. With higher prices we don't have to worry about the volume so much." Monster Costume CEO Kyle Kinkade opted for a custom app instead. Having debuted in the ebook scene with the highly popular Bartleby's Book of Buttons, Monster Costume is known for producing high-quality, extremely interactive titles with a strong attention to detail. "We do books as applications," he explained, "Because, frankly, there's no platform that's mature enough yet to support the kind of interaction we create. If iBooks Author could produce the level of what we wanted it to do, we'd use it in a heartbeat. The problem is that it can't handle the demands we put on an interactive book." For Monster Costume, iBooks Author's Keynote-esque toolset -- intended for ease of use and book production by non-programmers -- doesn't deliver the level of interactivity or customizability needed. The company builds its own proprietary book development tools in-house. "We can handle logic way better than iBooks Author, and we can handle high-level scripting," Kinkade said. "We provide finely detailed interaction as well. We can adjust ourselves and our engines to a much higher level of graphical horsepower, too. In comparison, iBooks doesn't provide the horsepower or the finesse that we need for our projects." Monster Costume is currently working on The Adventures of Tyler Washburn. Kinkade told TUAW, "For Washburn, the title we're building now, we just couldn't have done it in iBooks. That degree of graphics and interaction simply does not exist in the tools that Apple has provided." Economically, building in-house tools has been an investment in the future. "The cost of development for our engine was extremely high," Kinkade explained. "Using that engine for future titles will be at a far lower cost now that we've created it. We are in talks with various content producers and publishing companies right now to license those tools, to let them do what we do." Choosing to go in or out of the iBookstore represents another point of difference between developers. For Olson, iBooks is a positive. "The iBookstore is a new marketplace and iBooks Author books are an even newer phenomenon. That means that Apple loves to promote great examples of innovation on the platform and it's easier to get on their radar. It also takes fewer sales to get high up in the charts," he said. "So did we make the right choice? Absolutely. No regrets. Our iBook peaked at the #12 book in the iBookstore and was the #1 app in Arts & Entertainment for over two weeks. Sales are definitely not on the same scale as the App Store but they don't have to be because we charge more than what we would for an app and sales are good. We think we can find ways to make these iBooks even more efficiently and you can definitely expect more iBooks from us in the future." Kinkade prefers the App Store. "We've found that the iBookstore gets way less traffic than the traditional App Store. So we get the advantage by positioning our books with the apps. The only negative is that it's harder to get featured as a book in the App Store -- although we did. It was just hard as hell."
iBook Lessons: Publishing costs
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Andrew Hyde jumped into the ebook business with both feet. After fully funding a KickStarter project to raise start-up costs for his "This Book is about Travel," he published his manuscript to a variety of vendors. His outlets included Amazon's Kindle store, Apple's iBooks, and B&N's Nook, as well as Gumroad, a DRM-free PDF seller. What he found is that a ten-dollar ebook with lots of pictures brings home quite different earnings, depending on the vendor. In particular, he got hit -- and hit hard -- by Amazon's delivery fees. His 18 MB ebook costs him US$2.58 per Amazon download, which is a substantial overhead. Amazon details its delivery charges on this KDP help page. As an author, you pay $0.15 per megabyte in delivery charges, in addition to the 30% off-the-top costs Amazon charges. An image-heavy book will hit you hard in the pocketbook. That's quite different from Apple, which is happy to host resource-packed ebooks for a straight 30%. Hyde points out that delivering the same content using Amazon Web Services S3 would cost about a penny for each five downloads, bringing the Amazon mark up to about 129,000% in his calculation. So why sell Amazon? It's the demand. 51% of his Kickstarter supporters requested Kindle format, and 73% of his first 300 digital orders were Kindle. For all that Amazon charges, you don't make money on the books you don't sell. Hopefully, if enough authors speak up, Amazon will adjust its fee structure -- especially since many deliveries now happen over WiFi, not just Whispernet. Apple is providing an ever improving alternative for many readers, as I can personally see over time in the shift in sales of my ebooks. With its iBooks Author tool, allowance of books of up to 2GB in size, and strict 30% cut, Apple makes resource-rich books a more attractive prospect, assuming authors can find their customer base. Amazon remains the 800-pound gorilla in the ebook room. That may not always be so. Thanks, John Fricker
iBook Lessons: Style sheets
One of the challenges Steve Sande and I face, when building our ebooks, is to present our manuscripts with reasonable typographic flair. That's harder than you might first think because readers can customize many ebook features, including fonts. In iBooks, they may choose sans-serif Seravek over, say, serif'ed Palatino. Instead of worrying about particular font mixes, we found we needed to concentrate more on the layout geometry. These issues included relative font sizes (e.g. how the heading font size compared to the text font), indentations for lists and notes, in-paragraph spacing that controlled how dense each paragraph was wrapped together and between-paragraph spacing. Over time, we've evolved our in-house style sheet to define how each of these elements are laid out in our ebooks. Our latest effort, Pitch Perfect (left) looks a bit different when compared to our first ebook, Talking to Siri (right). We've gone a lot bolder with our font sizes, are using hues for subtitles (the Siri fonts are all solid black), and have tuned a lot of the layout. For example, we increased the paragraph to paragraph spacing for easier reading. We have developed these styles in Word and Pages, where you can tweak each of the paragraph characteristics and save them into named styles. In the following screen shot, you can see our basic paragraph characteristics, defining how stretched our characters are (not at all), the spacing between lines, and how much padding to add before and after the paragraph. When creating standard ebooks, these characteristics form the basis for ereader layout. It's then up to the reader app, whether iBooks, Kindle, or whatever, to decide how to finalize the presentation. You don't have a lot of say on the ultimate way the page will be seen by the reader but you can express your preferences for relative differences. Apple's iBooks Author changes that approach around entirely. By extending the EPUB standard to their own proprietary ibooks format (adding XML namespaces and CSS extensions), Apple has allowed authors finer control over ebook layout. When you create a book with Apple's tool, you're ensured that what you create is what the reader experiences. The following screenshot is from our iBooks-only title Getting Ready for Mountain Lion. Each typographic and visual element was laid out precisely in iBooks Author. From page breaks to figures to text, we could exactly preview each page as the reader would see it. What's more, Apple provides six high-quality style sheet templates for you to work with. You do not have to design your own styles to create eye-catching, beautiful manuscripts. Just choose an existing layout, and work from there. We did extend Apple's "basic" style template for "Getting Ready" because we used layout elements (such as in-text notes) that went beyond Apple's layout vocabulary. We also tweaked some of the styles we were given, including the blockquote element, to better match the way we were using our examples. iBooks Author allows you to save your customizations for re-use (File > Save as Template). The third party app Book Palette ($9.99, shown below) provides 20 custom templates built in this manner. Book styles range from cookery to business writing, brochures to glossy product overviews. The limits with Author, of course, are that you cannot distribute paid content outside of the iBooks store, that you cannot distribute to other platforms like the Nook or Kindle, and that you cannot create versions for iPhones and iPod touches. Author is iPad-only, Apple-only, iBooks only. For those reasons, when we had to choose which avenue to develop Pitch Perfect with, we decided on a standard EPUB. This allowed the book to be read across the iOS platform line, and on the Kindle and in Kindle apps. After using iBooks Author's beautiful layout tools, it's hard to go back to Word and Pages but it's a place that, for now, better serves our layout needs for a larger potential market.
Cleaning Mona Lisa: Bringing iBooks to a new standard
TUAW was treated to an advanced look at a new iBook from Tapity. "Cleaning Mona Lisa" offers all of thirty-odd pages of content. Of those, perhaps half are a gallery of pictures. Those numbers are deceiving however, as the application's video content, gorgeous imagery, and interactive widgets -- not its page count or its text -- drives the book's narrative. Launching at US$2.99, Cleaning Mona Lisa is hosted by Lee Sandstead, "the worlds most fired up art historian," according to Tapity's press briefing. I found his video snippets thoroughly engaging as he introduces readers to the technical story behind art masterpieces. The book explains how painting technique, from egg-based tempuras to glossy oils, evolved to try to define the "HDTV" of the 1500's. You see how careful restoration removes the haziness of years to bring back the colors, textures, and details originally created by each artist. The book is a perfect introduction for young readers as well as adults. Its mix of videos, custom interactive widgets, and light reading cover the topic in a way that's sure to create a new audience of art enthusiasts. Developer Jeremy Olson of Tapity was kind enough to sit down and talk with me about the genesis of the book. He explained how inspired he was at the Apple Design Awards he attended a few years ago. While picking up his own ADA for Grades 2, he discovered Push Pop Press's "Our Choice," an interactive book. When Apple released iBooks Author this year, Tapity decided to test the waters. Approached by numerous potential partners, they decided to embrace Lee Sandstead, to build a new kind of storytelling, "that engages and delights on every page." Olson found that content partnership leveraged with a lot of elbow grease could let them see if iBooks would provide an alternative development platform. "Developing iBooks," he explained, "involved little more than the cost of our time. We put in hundreds of hours on this project." Olson guesses that using iBooks Author offered them a factor of "5, 6, or even 7 times improvement" in man hours versus developing a traditional iOS application. This project represents a big experiment for Tapity. "If anyone likes this book, if it's successful, it could end up the iBooks poster child for success. If any independently published iBooks Author book is going to make business sense, it would probably be this one. So far we have made connections with Apple and have had a good response from the press." Olson hopes the book will find an audience and offsetting those hundreds of man hours with enough sales to allow them to move onto further iBooks projects. Tapity already has additional content providers waiting if Cleaning Mona Lisa sells well. "This is a partnership deal," he explained. "People are coming to us with content, looking for a way to publish it. We'd like to do more of these ibooks and become more of a product company." As for the future of iBooks, Olson added, "We feel that traditional publishers are missing a big opportunity for playing with this platform." Would Tapity consider moving to other platforms like Android? "Honestly? We're really not that interested," Olson said. "We're focused on Apple. That's where we know people and where we know the culture." As for those people who buy Cleaning Mona Lisa, Olson hopes they walk away from the book having been inspired by its lessons. "Our technology is engaging," he said. "It should not distract because in the end, the book should be the content. Our readers should be impressed by what they've learned, not just by how we presented it. "The most challenging part is putting all of that together in a purposeful way to make every page engaging and fun. A lot of iBooks we saw used the technology just for the sake of technology. Widgets seemed arbitrary. We wanted everything to add to the narrative and I think we accomplished that." Cleaning Mona Lisa is now available for sale in iBooks (US$2.99). It can be read on iPads only.
iBook Lessons: Book samples and rookie mistakes
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Talk about rookie mistakes! We finally discovered the reason the iPad-only iBooks Author version of our Mountain Lion ebook got stuck on its way to release: we hadn't submitted a custom sample along with the full ebook. Every iBooks Author submission requires a sample book for paid book accounts: "[A] custom created sample...is required for all Multi-Touch books offered for sale in the iBookstore" For further details, Apple has a support article about publishing requirements here. So we went ahead and created our sample. To do this, you duplicate your book to a new project and then delete all non-sample content. Removing chapters is easy: select them, click delete. It's a little more complicated for in-sample chapter-text. You must edit the actual content. Make sure you delete the text and images you want gone, and then trim away any remaining pages. It took us a number of tries to get this right because we thought we could delete pages directly by selecting them and clicking delete. You can't. Pages only represent layout, not content, and our undeleted content kept popping back at us until we figured this bit out. Once the project was trimmed down to size, we saved it and exported it to an .ibooks author file. We then bundled the full and sample versions up through iTunes Producer and re-submitted to iTunes connect. The multi-touch book went live in the store instantly upon uploading the sample version. One of the reasons this process went as quickly as it did is that Apple has apparently been conducting its own internal audits, finding books that have been submitted to the iBookstore but that haven't gone live yet. Support requests like ours trigger a list of issues that need addressing. We now wish that we had contacted Apple sooner, rather than falling into the "we have no control or say in this process" mindset. Of course, Apple could have simply sent a robo-email telling us that the iBook needed a sample rather than making us wait two weeks to find our mistake. Deciding what to include in our sample led a bit of debate. We weren't sure whether to include an entire section (which we weren't sure would work out of context) or bits and pieces from all over the book. In the end, we settled on distributing our preface, which includes overviews of each of our chapters and our intro-video, which welcomes readers and explains the purpose of the book. For a larger book, we think we might have gone with a full sample chapter instead. We couldn't find much online discussions about choosing material to include in a sample. (We're used to Amazon and iBooks deciding that for us from our EPUB.) To this end, here's what we felt would be relevant to creating sample content: It should reflect the writing style of the authors, to give readers a sense of the flow and pace of the text, and answer the question "Does this author's voice match the way I want to read?" It should reflect the contents, showing readers some of the scope that the book covers, "Am I interested in this material? Does it have compelling utility?" If the book has a particular flow, for example lessons, it should showcase that style, "Can I follow along the way this book is teaching me based on this sample?" Beyond those few thoughts, however, our immediate push was to get a sample created and submitted. I'm sure if we had spent a little more time and effort, we could have expanded these ideas further; maybe if we ever get around to writing "iBook Lessons" as a standalone book, we'll flesh this out. For now, we got past a hurdle we weren't aware even existed, and learned an important lesson about being proactive with support requests. Hopefully our rookie mistake will save you some wasted time and effort. Do you have thoughts about creating ebook samples to share? Or examples of your own rookie mistakes? Drop a comment and let us know.
iBook Lessons: The long and short of ebook submission review times
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Last Autumn, after Apple launched the iPhone 4S, Steve Sande and I wrote Talking to Siri. It took several weeks to move through Apple review. Throughout all that time, people kept asking us, "Aren't you going to offer an iBooks version?" and we were all, "Patience, all in the fullness of time." The fullness of time, in that case, was almost a month. Since then, Apple has made major internal changes that have sped up the approval process for both books and applications. Last week, Steve and I submitted Pitch Perfect, our new book about communicating with blogs. It was greenlit in hours. Hours. To get a sense of why we were so stunned by this, compare and contrast with another book we submitted several weeks ago: Getting Ready for Mountain Lion. It's a short how-to that discusses how to prepare your computer for the coming upgrade. Our EPUB version went live just about the time Pitch Perfect did. (Yes, your votes did matter.) The iBooks Author version, the one with the video introduction and the pretty page layouts, is still in review, about three weeks after we first submitted it. So what's an author to do? With Amazon, you can usually count on a book making it through review in a few days. Our quickest turn-around (for Pitch Perfect, incidentally) was several hours. We submitted midday, and it was live before we finished the workday. Our longest was over a weekend. I don't think we've ever exceeded 72 hours with Amazon review. With iTunes, however, all you get is a status: "Not on 32 stores". As with application review, there's no indication that lets you know where the book is in its progress to the iBooks store and what might be holding it up. Because we have the zen attitudes and relative attention span of three year olds, we decided to contact iTunes and submit a support query to a rep. We wanted to know how the book was doing and when we might expect it to be approved. The problem with the "Contact us" option in iTunes Connect is that there are few ways to actually contact Apple. Most choices lead you to a FAQ page rather than a contact form. We discovered that obvious choices like "Manage Your Books > Book Status > Checking Status" got us nowhere. After some digging, we finally discovered "Content Status Inquiries > Unknown Issue", which finally allowed us to submit a request about a "Content Status error". Our book had been in review for several weeks, which we felt was a reasonable "status error" as far as we're concerned. We filled out the form and shot it off. About a week later, we've still never heard back. Now, be aware that working with iBooks Author material comes with a warning that quality assurance can take "up to 2 weeks" to process, depending on a book's complexity. Our Mountain Lion book isn't particularly complex and we exceeded that 2 week period early last week. For now, we're repeating mantras like "It will pub when it pubs" and "Be a leaf in the Apple iBooks wind, traveling without complaint or direction", but it would be awfully nice if we had access to a little more feedback during the process. Have you dealt with long review times with iBooks? How did things work out for you? Drop a comment and share your story.
iBook Lessons: Using Book Proofer to preview EPUB files
iBooks Author is an amazing tool for laying out and publishing ebooks to iTunes. Unfortunately, the application creates books that are only readable on iPads. You trade off fantastic page design (via Apple's proprietary .iBooks format) for a much smaller potential reading audience. When you want readers to be able to peruse your book on iPhone, you'll need to go with EPUB format instead. For all its faults, Pages still offers the best tool for creating compliant iTunes EPUB submissions that pass submission validation. Steve and I have been hard at work on a couple of books, preparing them for submission to Amazon and iBooks. Our workflow starts with writing and editing in Microsoft Word. This allows us to use Word's collaboration and revision tools to produce a file that can be submitted directly to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. For all that we yell and complain about Word, it's still the most powerful tool in our arsenal for manuscript preparation. From there, we move to Pages where we mark out sections (Inset > Section Break, File > Save). This is an important step we've learned. Sections allow us to use images throughout our entire document. Otherwise, images are limited to 11 megabytes of unencoded data per section (or "chapter" in Apple's documentation). Pages omits those extra images during EPUB creation. Careful section insertion bypasses that issue. From Pages, we export to EPUB taking care to check our primary metadata: publication name, author credits, and genre. Once exported, this is where a great new tool from Apple becomes part of our flow. Book Proofer (now available from your iTunes Connect author account) allows you to sync and preview EPUB files. Just as iBooks Author lets you sync and preview iBooks files, Book Proofer does the same for EPUB. Drop a book onto the wooden shelf at the top of the app, select a device to sync to, and it opens in iBooks, ready for inspection. Unlike the iBooks Author version of this functionality, Book Proofer syncs with all iOS devices, not just iPads. Be aware that you still need to have iBooks open on-device as in the iBooks Author version: Once synced and open, we check for formatting issues, inspect our images to make sure they all made it through EPUB conversion, and perform a final sanity check. From there it's time to make any final metadata updates in Calibre before we submit to iTunes and begin our weeks or months long wait for approval. While Apple's iBooks Author has received all of the attention in the press lately, the company also deserves a lot of credit and kudos for developing Book Proofer as a tool for working with EPUB files.
You're Our Editor: iBooks Author or ePub for the iBooks store?
Normally we turn to the TUAW Brain Trust for your opinions about hot topics in the news and your predictions about the future of tech. Today, we're switching things up. Instead of asking about where things are going, we're asking you about strategy. Here's the situation: Like many authors, TUAW blogger Steve Sande and I have fallen in love with Apple's iBooks Author page layout tool. When writing our book about preparing your computer for the upcoming 10.8 OS X upgrade, we decided to create an iBA version for iBooks and a standard Kindle edition for Amazon. Although frustrating to use at times (it's still early days in iBooks-ville, such as where's the "Split into new chapter at this point" option?), we loved the look and feel of what iBooks Author produced. It's slick, it's hot, it's yummy. We uploaded our product last week using the nifty in-app "Publish to iBooks" feature. Then people started asking us: "What about us iPhone users? Don't we get to read the book too?" You see, here's the problem: iBooks Author doesn't do iPhone. It's an iPad-only product. And there is the heart of our dilemma. Should we invest the time, the extra ISBN, and the extremely high annoyance overhead to convert our Kindle version to an iBooks-compliant ePUB via our old creaky copies of Pages? (We mean it about the annoyance. It's a huge pain.) You tell us. We're going to go with your advice. We're giving you a poll and the comments are open for your opinion. Should ebook authors make an end-run around iBooks Author to create iPhone-compatible ePUBs that reach a wider audience or are we wasting time and effort on a format that can never really compare to the iPad experience? %Poll-75089%
iBook Lessons: Creating Amazon KDP tables of contents on MS Word for Macintosh
For whatever reason, many Amazon authors seem to be under the impression that you can only create a proper table of contents for Kindle Direct Publishing on Windows, not the Mac. Having just uploaded our newest book (Getting Ready for Mountain Lion) to Amazon, Steve Sande and I have invested a lot of time learning the quirks of KDP and its tools, as well as those for iBooks (but more about that in another post). For any of our readers who are also budding authors or publishers, we'll be sharing what we've learned in a TUAW series called "iBook Lessons." We thought we'd share our KDP Table of Contents strategy with you to help reduce the hair-pulling and frustration associated with document preparation. Here are the steps we use in Microsoft Word 2008 and 2011 to create our TOC. Create a fresh page and add Table of Contents text line, formatted with your favorite header style. Move your cursor just to the left of "Table". Choose Insert > Bookmark. Call the bookmark toc and click Add. This creates a bookmark before the title, named in such a way that KDP's automatic conversion tools will recognize it as the start of your Table of Contents. All the Kindle hardware and apps will be able to use it as well. Generate a temporary TOC, so you have an outline to start working with. Move to under your Table of Contents header to a new line. Choose Insert > Index and Tables > Table of Contents. Uncheck "Show Page Numbers". Click Options. Choose which heading styles you wish to include. If you use custom styles (e.g. H1 instead of Header 1) make sure to add a level for those as well. Typically, most ebook TOCs use either just H1 or H1 and H2. Your call. Click OK to finish options. Click OK again to generate the contents. Select the entire TOC, cut it, and paste it into TextEdit to be your guide to the next step. For each entry in the TOC, locate the start of that section in your manuscript. Set your cursor to the left of each section title. Again, use Insert > Bookmark to create a bookmark at that position. Name each item with a meaningful (and easy-to-recognize) tag. After bookmarking your entire document, return to the initial Table of Contents section. Paste the text from TextEdit back into your document as simple, unlinked text. For each item on your list, select the entire line: i.e. every word, not just clicking to the left of the name as you did to set bookmarks. Then choose Insert > Hyperlink (Command-K). Choose the Document tab, and click the Locate button to the right of the Anchor text field. Choose the bookmark you wish to link to, and click OK. Repeat for the remaining TOC entries. Once you've finished adding bookmarks and hyperlinks, save your work. Go to KDP and upload the file (you may want to create a testbed skeleton book entry just for this purpose). Download the .mobi file it generates and try it out on the Kindle Mac app and/or any Kindles or iPads/iPhones you have on-hand. Amazon's Kindle Previewer app is also available for download from KDP, and provides simulated views of your ebook on iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Kindle DX, and Kindle Fire. Always make sure you test each link to ensure that the bookmarks are placed properly. Also test the Table of Contents button in-app and check that it jumps you to the TOC correctly. Best of luck in your ebook / iBook publishing efforts, and look forward to more tips about publishing here on TUAW.
iBooks Author Challenge: Adding spelling quizzes to iBooks
Dave Caolo and I were chatting this morning about iBooks and spelling. "It's not my daughter's favorite subject," he said, "and I'm looking for a way to make it more appealing to her." He asked if there could there be any way to incorporate spelling quizzes into iBooks via Author. The answer is, unfortunately, not clearly yes. That's because iBooks Author assumes that all interaction will be by multiple choice. That means you can create interactions to choose from common misspellings and from homonyms, but can't solicit freeform text entry. That gives rise to the kind of interaction you see below. The shortcomings are apparent. For example, you cannot define any item that isn't tied to a specific location (so you can't create a pool of misspellings without destinations). If the reader switches the order of the two misspelled words (here Tale and Flour) those are marked wrong as well. So I hopped into Dashcode and built a widget that would solicit a correctly spelled word and embedded it into an Author project as follows. This turned out to be a failure. Although the embedded audio prompt worked fine (albeit in a separate interactive element), widgets do not run in-line and iBook's interpretation of the widget hid my embedded checker button. This might be due to my subpar Widget construction, or I may simply be running into iBooks 2 limitations. So how can you expand iBooks for spelling? This post tells you where I am to date. If you have a better solution, drop a note into the comments. And if you are an expert Dashboard widget engineer, please ping me offline. I'd really love to test out the possibilities and limitations of this tech.
Using iBooks Author to produce a comic
When iBooks Author was released last week, I saw the potential for using it to port the webcomic I co-create to the iPad to go along with our upcoming print edition. I'm not alone, as Richard Stevens of Diesel Sweeties immediately took the chance to test iBooks Author by creating an ebook with the most recent month's worth of comics. Stevens is offering the ebook through his website via Dropbox rather than through the main iBooks store, so those who want to test it out will need to manually sync it over, email it to themselves on the iPad or use an app such as Dropbox to add it on the iPad. Stevens said he would love to eventually get a collection to readers that's searchable, sortable by character and major storyline and more. For my own comic, I'd love to add in some of the historical information on the characters, the fairy tales used, etc. iBooks Author is a step toward making these sorts of interactive comics available, and it'll be create to see how other comics creators can bend iBooks Author to their will. [Via Macstories]
iBooks Author owns your format, not your content
There's been a lot of heat and fury surrounding the iBooks Author terms and conditions ever since the service was introduced last week. To boil the controversy down to basics, Apple has introduced a private protocol extension that takes EPUB to the next generation. And then they created a business model that uses this proprietary technology to monetize commercial transactions. This runs right in line with my predictions from earlier this month. This decision, to build a proprietary format on an open standard, has led to a lively debate about whether a member of an open standards organization should be creating private standards like the .ibooks format or AirPlay. And, to be fair to Apple, to even realize that this proprietary format is based on an open standard, you actually have to crack open the files and expose the EPUB underpinnings. Apple wasn't exactly announcing how they did things last week at the educational media event. From a tech point of view, the .ibooks format itself is exciting stuff. It takes a major step forward, blending HTML 5 tech directly into ebooks and unifying books with the complete iWorks suite. A few weeks ago, I wrote that "I believe that Apple should be leading a revolution in embedded live book elements with video, programmable app and web integration, and more (Think "Khan Academy" as books, for example). Why aren't we seeing both the specs and the tools with Apple trailblazing forward?" Today, that reality is here, with iBooks Author. I know several people who are already using the Khan Academy material. And because Apple moves the format forward so much from the open standard it was based upon, developers should have no issues with Apple making the updated version private. If you thought Dashcode was an optional Xcode extra not worthy of notice, now's a great time to reassess. At the risk of being hit with rotten vegetables, the "sweet solution" of 2007 has now come into its own: 1960's? Plastic. 2010's? HTML 5. With smart coding, you can embed entire applications into iBooks. Scarily accomplished developer Steven Troughton-Smith recently managed to embed a playable version of his classic iOS app Lights Off inside an iBooks book using a Dashcode widget written with HTML 5. "This is the first time Dashboard widgets have worked on iOS," he points out. What's more, he tells me that some developers have gotten the WebOS app framework (Enyo) and Cappucino to run inside their books. In terms of creative expression, this is a huge development with nearly limitless possibilities. Troughton-Smith said, "It will be absolutely epic for designers and developers making portfolios, or perhaps a book that reviews apps and contains mini versions, or whatever." So yes, Apple intends to control the sole paid delivery portal for this technology, freely offering the tool to create new .ibooks files, taking a 30% cut of all commercial material developed using this specification. At the same time, they're the ones who are developing both the authoring tools and the distribution apps on their own nickel. I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that I believe that Apple is moving forward in a smart and well-calculated fashion. While Amazon's KDP Select program created exclusivity due to legal agreements and shared profits, Apple is building its own kind of proprietary author cadre based on new and forward-looking technology. Absolutely no one will be forced to use the new .ibooks format or the tools that create those files. If you wish to publish a non-exclusive EPUB on the iBooks store as well as on Amazon, Nook, etc, you are welcome to do so. Nor do I personally think that Apple will come after anyone who shares material between .ibooks editions and EPUB ones. I am, obviously not a lawyer, but I believe Apple is protecting and charging for use of its format, not aggressively seizing content. On the whole, I have been deeply pleased with nearly everything I have discovered in iBooks -- from its media support to its strong accessibility extensions. I don't know about you, but I'm getting ready to brush up on my Javascript skills. If you're an app dev, you probably will want to as well. [Update February 3rd 2012: Apple's terms and conditions now clarify "If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple. This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format."]
How Apple iBooks needs to compete with Amazon: Better author tools
Amazon has trailblazed; Apple has followed. Apple's iBooks program currently allows authors to self-publish ebooks. Authors create their own business built around iTunes Connect, just as they do for self-published apps. So where does Apple have room to improve? What follows is one of several posts about how iBooks can improve to better compete with Amazon. In this post, I discuss how Apple needs to create a better authoring platform to help support their independent authors. iBooks tools are frustrating. You can publish on Amazon with little more than an account, a doc file and a smile. For iBooks, you need validated ePub files, ISBN identifiers from the Library of Congress and a willingness to run the gauntlet of contracts, paperwork, and the hell that is iTunes Connect. iTunes Connect It's not that iTunes Connect is so unusuable from a web page perspective, it's that its servers are often so loaded that each request (such as select a country and set a price level, repeat 30-odd times) may take several minutes to complete for each region. You can lose an entire day of work just moving through paperwork details. There is a workaround: you can use a hacky, poorly-documented tool called iTunes Producer to update your product metadata and it will save you lots of time. But if iTunes Producer, with its amateur-level support, is all that Apple means to bring to the table, then it must re-address how it works with with the iBooks content-creator base. Amazon makes it so simple and intuitive to list books that when you have to move over to iTunes, the difference hits you right in the face. Keep in mind that I personally use iTunes to sell both books and apps. It's not that iTunes is so horrible, especially when you set aside any issues of server responsiveness, it's just that it could be so much better. Getting Started Recently, Steve Sande and I went through the iBooks process for our "Talking to Siri: Learning the Language of Apple's Intelligent Assistant" ebook. It was quite the learning process, taking several weeks until we could get the book clear for sale. With Amazon, the book went live within a couple of days after we first posted it. We had to fill out two quick pages of information and hit the Publish button. On iBooks, we had to set up our contracts, taxes, and banking details, produce a properly formatted end-product (Amazon automated that entire process for us and provided a beautiful preview tool), and wait for it to work through review. Admittedly, you can use a certified aggregator like Smashwords or Lulu to relist your books to most major vending sites including iBooks. They provide the ISBN and take another cut of your profits above Apple's, typically leaving you with about 50-60% of the list price, versus Apple's basic 70% of list price. They handle all the little details that you normally encounter at iTunes using their own custom interface to help you manage your content metadata, pricing, and marketing materials. Apple-approved aggregators for North America include: Ingram, INscribe Digital, LibreDigital, Lulu, and Smashwords. European aggregators are Bookwire and Immatériel. Of these, only Smashwords will convert MS Word documents to ePub. Keep in mind that the strength of these services should focus on providing full book deployment to every available market, not just because you want to sidestep iBooks. ISBNs If all you want to do is publish to iBooks, you'd be better off setting yourself up to create an iTunes account and buying your own ISBNs rather than go the aggregator route. If you plan to distribute in iBooks, you'll need those ISBNs to register each book. Bowker is the exclusive ISBN provider for the Library of Congress. A single ISBN costs $125. You can pick up a ten-pack for $250, a 100-pack for $575 and 1000 for $1000 -- just a dollar per ISBN. It's all economy of scale. If you want to buy more, prices for even higher volumes are negotiable. Contact Bowker directly. Most new authors will choose the ten-pack option, which provides a way to test the waters for more than one book with a minimal commitment. Bowker's free title registration service allows you to ensure that your book title is unique and won't be duplicated. You can create free barcodes for your books at Bowkers as well. Because Amazon doesn't require ISBNs to list and sell books, independent authors find it much cheaper and more straight forward to market in the Kindle store, leaving all other issues of simplicity aside. If Apple wants to gain some of that market, they may consider stepping away from traditional publishing ideas to introduce a way to streamline product listings that aren't tied to ISBNs. Authoring Tools If you have a copy of MS Word or Open Office, you have all the tools you need to write for the Amazon ebook market. Just create a simple style sheet (Steve and I used just seven styles for our books, including headers, paragraphs, notes, lists, and figures) or use the default, write the book itself (I know, I know, the hard part) and include any images in-line that you want to appear in the book. Speaking of which, here's an easy pro-tip: Don't resize the images. Include them in full scale in the document and let Amazon's conversion tools handle all resizing for you. Life lesson learned, life lesson shared. Moving on. For iBooks, we investigated several (for that you can read "OMG, I can't belive how many we actually tried, it was insane") ePub preparation and conversion solutions. In the end, we ended up using Pages as the most reliable way to create ePubs that passed validation. Although Word can export HTML and Calibre can convert to ePub, it failed our validation tests. We reserved Calibre for editing metadata once the ePub was already created. We looked seriously at Storyist, which is a terrific authoring tool but one that didn't live as comfortably in the must-convert-between-formats realm with our primary authoring done in Word. The fault lay in our workflow, not in that app in particular. Give it a look see, it's well worth investigating, especially if you're looking for a tool that helps you plan your book as well as write it. Pages is a fine content creation tool but it's not serious enough or appropriate for what we wanted and needed to do in our ebooks. It feels deeply out of date and in no way lends itself to the content creation, reviewing, and editing tasks we needed for our production. We ended up writing in Word, importing into Pages, and then converting into ePub from there. For a 150+ page ebook, that took much longer than you might think. Add to the import and conversion times, overhead for ePub inspection. Another pro tip: Make sure you use Pages' section break tools, not Word's. Otherwise, Pages will throw out all pictures past the initial ten images. Another lovely life lesson learned the hard way. In fact, there's a gaping hole in Apple's product line when it comes to ebook authoring and production. iWork has not been updated for OS X since '09. It's crying out for a smart, current refresh that reflects the modern world of AirPlay, iBooks, Apple TV 2, and other state-of-the-art changes. Too much has happened in three years. What's more, the ePub specification and Apple's inherent multimedia focus mean that iBooks should be able to move leaps and bounds beyond where ebooks currently are. Do current specs with their end-user-picks-the-font presentations really provide the best reading and presentation experience possible? Shouldn't Apple be looking at smart typesetting that's a little more sophisticated? And where else could they be pushing the envelope? I believe that Apple should be leading a revolution in embedded live book elements with video, programmable app and web integration, and more (Think "Khan Academy" as books, for example). Why aren't we seeing both the specs and the tools with Apple trailblazing forward? As it is, Apple is taking a back seat to...Word docs. That's just sad. WWDR for Authors and Publishers What Apple really needs is an internal initiative that matches (and exceeds, honestly) its World Wide Developer Relations for app development, but on the book publishing side of things. Apple needs a WWDC for publishing, evangelists and road shows, and internal Mac-driven tools that allow authors to expand beyond the current iBooks offerings. As Apple's product line moves more and more towards consumers, its support for independent authors (and developers) needs to evolve as well. Apple needs to integrate author-to-author resources, like its devforums theoretically should for app programmers (Admittedly those forums have somewhat devolved into Apple personnel ordering people to file "radars", aka bug reports rather than providing the kind of warm human support many developers might hope for, but they're far better than no support at all). I could easily imagine signing up for a yearly independent authoring program (complete with 2 tech support incidents if the program is paid), access to high-level Apple-supplied creation tools and bypassing the current ISBN-based publishing paradigm. In the end, if Apple is to make its mark in iBooks, it has to both simplify publishing for independents and set its products apart in terms of expressive possibilty. Posts in this series: KDP Select Better Author Tools Cross Platform Support
