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Apple to Launch 'Garageband for e-books' on Thursday? [Updated]
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If this is the dawn of self-publishing on Apple gadgets it's most likely a shot at amazon, who have been doing this on Kindle for a while now, and even had their first million selling self-published book a while ago. Those kinds of figures make even Apple sniff the potential profit.
"Intimately involved" probably means that Steve stepped in the room, looked at what the developers had on their screens and said "this sucks", "it's not fancy enough" (okay, that one was a famous Bill Gates phrase) or he gave them some more specific instructions. Jobs' involvement happened on a managerial level, and I think everybody who has ever worked in a company knows first hand what the "intimate" involvement of a manager actually (only) means.
What made Jobs different than the average manager were his sophisticated taste and sense for beauty which helped him filter out mediocrity.
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So this thing has to be an easy to use mix of Scrivener, Acrobat and... Flash. If they can pull this off, I'll buy it in a heartbeat - provided that it can create content for multiple platforms. But knowing that this is Apple, it will probably only create stuff for their iOS-based products, and then I'm already no longer interested.
Jesus, have you been living under a rock? You could publish books on Amazon's Kindle Store and Apple's iBooks Store from day one. It has never been easier to get your work published and the necessary tools for that have also been available for a long time now, and some of them are even free. But getting your stuff SOLD still is the difficult part, and no magic "Garageband for eBooks" will make that easier.
Because he thinks he's the first one to ever think of self-publishing?
People have been self-publishing via Amazon for a while now.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-summary-page.html?topic=200260520
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Ah I see you beat me to it.
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Apple's going to open a store and only Apple approved books will get published, proving that 1984 was like 1984 after all.
Seriously, this would be great, especially if interactive features and content could be created, similar to say captivate. Combine that with Apple's way to make things intuitive, simple, with a good distribution model and they will have a real winner.
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I hope this is true. I've been trying to learn how to author an ebook that is heavy on pictures and organization and the options are confusing and limited. Pages does export, but it's very far from the solution I want.
Yeah, that iOS wall can be a turn off, but if they really would like to help education with some seriously helpful apps, wouldn't there be an export feature that can run on other platforms?
It does seem like a problem though...
epub is only for iPads and iPhones...
pdfs are not Apple
so the only way this will work is if there's a Windows program that will run the end product of the newly planned textbooks.. THAT will not likely happen...
I don't know what will be announced, but if it IS something awesome, then great! If not.. well, I'll have fun with it on my macs and iPads. .. I guess..
I see your pleasantly-worded post has disappeared, but to answer your (now deleted) questions, via MathType it's been possible to enter complex mathematical equations in Pages documents for some time. Also, you can, for example, embed video in a Pages document. Both equations and video carry over to the Pages-generated ePub output, and, of course, can be viewed on an iPad or iPhone.
It doesn't take much to imagine that a new version of Pages might allow for a greater degree of interactivity and flexibility.
I would love to see this! If they make publishing to the iBook store easy, and offer a 70/30 revenue split, Apple is going to make a ton of money and so are independent authors.
Heck, this might inspire me to start jotting down some of my business expertise and getting published too!
Heck, this might inspire me to start jotting down some of my business expertise and getting published too!
Absolutely nothing
, and wouldent know how to wright a Remotly successful book if I tried lmao
Agreed, App Store brought an easy way to make money as an amateur developer, maybe this will do the same in the book business? What I look forward to the most though, is Apple kicking the education industry's ass and makes them evolve into the digital life!
It would be nice if it competed somewhat with Adobe's digital publishing suite in CS 5.5. Not necessarily that professional, but it's fairly complicated to create an interactive publication (with video, slideshows, links, etc). You start with InDesign, then use their Folio Builder, then sign-up for an Acrobat.com account, then hope someone downloads the Adobe folio reader for an iPad.
Would love to just easily create a publication that I could submit to the iOS 5 Newsstand easier.
This ALMOST makes me wish I was back in school.. Very cool though for those who will be able to use this!
Partner with Wolfram?
Since Apple has a relationship with Wolfram-Alpha (for Siri), I wonder if they're going to include support for Wolfram's new Computable Document Format (CDF) on Thursday.
If they're talking about creating interactive documents, this is one way to do it.
http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/
If Apple can find a way to make it super easy to create a document with this level of interactivity, then it may be game-changing.
Since Apple has a relationship with Wolfram-Alpha (for Siri), I wonder if they're going to include support for Wolfram's new Computable Document Format (CDF) on Thursday.
If they're talking about creating interactive documents, this is one way to do it.
http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/
If Apple can find a way to make it super easy to create a document with this level of interactivity, then it may be game-changing.
Except that Amazon's version of self-publishing is entirely one dimensional, i.e., just text on a screen. It sounds like the tool Apple will announce is going to allow a layman to create an interactive publication without typing a single line of code, just drag and drop. If that turns out to be the case big difference I'd say.
Not sure how this would hurt Amazon - if we assume full ePub3 standard support and not some odd Apple standard; all Amazon needs to do is provide a way to migrate the books to their Kindle platform. Publishers can then sell on a multitude of sites. Now, if Apple started to add Kindle versions, then...
No, Amazon's KF8 (announced last year; the SDK was recently released) allows interactive formats. As does epub3, although I don't think any readers actually support this.
If Apple gets publishers on board, this will be a big deal. Just another interactive format is much less of a big deal...although there is always room for improvement.