Apple announced its FREE ebook publishing platform iBooks Author on January 19th and since the announcement there have been a flurry of posts in the blogoshere, on twitter and in all other forms of social media commenting on Apples move into ebook publishing. A few of the sites I follow include:
Engaget: Apple’s iBooks Author hands-on provide a general overview of the Author tool.
Macleans: 90,000 have downloaded iBooks Author since Thursday offers straight data on just how much interest there is in the authoring tool.
Chronicle of Higher Education: Apple’s New E-Textbook Platform Enters an Already Crowded Field is relatively negative perspective from the Technology writer Jeffery Young.
Mashable: This Is How Apple Changes Education, Forever provides a glowing review the authoring tool and the impact it will have on education.
Regardless of that the early reviews reveal, through this FREE platform, Apple gives us the ability to create interactive ebooks with rich media, 3D images and a wide range of interactive features. These books can be saved to PDF, epub or can be published to the iBook store so even if you don’t have an iPad or a Mac you can still share the books with just about anyone. There currently isn’t another FREE tool that offers all this. Yes the full features will only be available for viewing on the iPad but all this means is that the Android world will have another tool to copy–which is a good thing.
Over the years I have used Aldus Pagemaker, Macromedia Pagemaker and then Adobe Pagemaker, InDesign and many other programs looking for the ultimate tool to help me build a book and I have always ended up not only hundreds of dollars poorer but also countless hour poorer. Apples iBook Author is a wonderful first offering from Apple and I look forward to seeing that impact it will have on the book and textbook publishing industry.
