Roll your own.

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iBooks Author is free OS X (Lion only) software from Apple which makes it relatively easy to create ebooks with interactive content. The user interface will be familiar to anyone who has used iWork’s Pages or Keynote with content easily added using drag and drop.

I wrote about how easy it is to create ‘flat’ PDF photobooks using Pages here and if you want to see the difference between a flat book and an interactive one, take a look at Al Gore’s excellent offering on global warming. That one took a large team of programmers and is full of very high quality content. iBooks Author (“iBA”) makes it simple for anyone to create something almost as polished, in a fraction of the time.

For traditional novelists, this is a waste of time. There are multiple self-publishing services like Lulu and Blurb which do just fine with text and a modicum of pictorial content, though the latter quickly becomes price prohibitive. And for most photographers iBA adds nothing that cannot be done as well, or better, on a web site. But if interactive content is your thing – touch a map, see a picture, hear sounds, look at graphical data and so on – then iBA is an appealing offering.

I downloaded the app and found it easy to use. There are only six templates provided but you can bet that number will grow quickly. Adding movies and touch-interactive content is simple. Best of all, you can simply attach your iPad to your Mac (iBA is for iPad output only, no iPhones) and preview your work in the iBooks iPad app. This works well.

iBooks Author outputting a draft to the iPad.

Economics and Marketing:

In exchange for making the app available at no cost, Apple dictates that any sales be made through its AppStore, meaning they keep 30%. If your product is free, you can distribute it either through the AppStore or directly. While this has caused much protest from the brigade of wooly thinkers who dominate the blogosphere, there is nothing wrong with this. If you don’t like the exclusive distribution model just wait a few months for competing products for Android to come along, as they surely will. Or simply create a web app where updates require no new app downloads. So such criticism misses the point. The AppStore is not a marketing medium, any more than Blurb or Amazon is a marketing medium. It is a distribution mechanism. Without marketing your one book is lost , buried in one million apps in the AppStore or five million books at Amazon. It will sell to friends and relatives only and to you as a ‘vanity’ sale. When was the last time you found an app by looking in the mess that is the AppStore? Chances are that, like me, you heard about it by reading a blog or newspaper of interest. [/column][column width=45% padding=5%] Without that sort of exposure it doesn’t matter what percentage Apple monopolistically commands, as your income will be precisely zero. So iBA does not take away the need to market your product. It’s a creative tool, not a selling one. Absent marketing, your presence in the AppStore is worthless and Apple’s claim to exclusive distribution is meaningless.

For photographers, iBA is a mixed picture. For traditional still makers it adds little and takes away much from what can be done with a traditional web site. Your display is limited to the small confines of an iPad’s screen and moving around content can be made far easier in a web site. But for photographers who need the interactive capabilities, this could be a powerful creative tool. One reader suggested this would be an ideal mechanism for making his forthcoming book of flower pictures, a variation on the traditional travel book. Touch the snap of the location and you get a map. Touch a flower in the snap and you get details and close-ups. Generally, tour books, be they of cities, art collections, geographies and so on are ideally suited to this presentation. But for the traditional high quality print maker, a web site remains superior.

Apple’s intended market:

Apple is targeting iBA at books for US high school students. Good luck with that. First, America is a nation which denigrates education. Look at any political campaign and the educated candidate will be accused of elitism. God help him if he also happens to speak French. It’s an attitude which has taken US public schools from first to worst in the Western world in a generation, aided by corrupt unions who prevent dismissal of illiterate teachers and school book publishers who rape the system with $75 text books whose production and distribution cost is $5 at most. It’s a $20bn annual revenue business. Their sole marketing costs are the occasional bribe/political donation to make sure their book is accepted by the system. So getting these entrenched interests to budge is a Sisyphean task, the publishers’ promises to make iBooks text books available for $15 notwithstanding. Finding the money in the public school system for all those iPads is likely impossible, compounded by high theft and damage rates. This will simply widen the gulf between private and public schooling. Private schools will require parents to provide iPads to their children, or will do so from endowment funds, while public school students will continue with 15th Century technology while political debate rages. And simply moving to a better area to avail your child of better public schooling will not cut it. The system will never permit one school to have the technology denied another. By definition, a system which refuses admission to no one will always cater to the lowest common denominator. Further, pandering by politicians to minorities with the resulting corrosive effects of biculturalism (my son needs to learn Spanish why, exactly?) will only see a broadening of that gulf. Sorry, but I don’t recall Spanish being spoken in America’s boardrooms, which I have frequented a good deal, other than by the cleaning staff.

Value for photographers:

So iBA has a place for photographers seeking an interactive presentation for their work. For all others, be they public schools or traditional print workers, there’s nothing here to look at. The print worker already has superior tools available, and the public school is beyond saving.

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