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Diesel Sweeties turns iBooks Author experiment into successful Kickstarter
A couple weeks ago, Richard Stevens decided to create a free ebook of with a month's worth of his webcomic series, Diesel Sweeties, using iBooks Author. We reported on the experiment then, but Stevens recently disclosed just how big of a success it was: More than 10,000 downloads in three days of the iPad book. Stevens has propelled that success into a Kickstarter campaign, where he will distribute his entire series to date for free in two forms: a PDF ebook and an iBook that will be more than 3,000 pages long. Stevens said he would be making the two versions simultaneously in iBooks Author and Adobe InDesign. Looking to raise $3,000 initially, Stevens already has raised nearly $17,000 with less than 27 days remaining in his campaign. I figured it wouldn't take long to see iBooks Author help drive a project such as this to a success, but I am surprised to see that it's happened within a month of the program's release. It'll be great to see final ebook, and I hope that iBooks Author can manage a project size that big!
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]
