Who wants lowest common denominator ebook publishing? If you believe the click-farmers, WE do. Well I don't. I'm very happy to get state of the art ebooks on my iPad. Kindle doesn't do it for me, even for plain text books. I'll use the app if I need to, but it doesn't satisfy. The devices must be even worse, with that hideous grey-on-grey screen and laughable user interface. Hence the Fire. Not holding my breath on that one.
Back to iBooks Author. Can we just call it Author, for brevity? Sadly, rational discussion about great software and how simple it makes the most complex tasks apparently 'doesn't sell'.
We get spurious arguments about. Companies that sell you software, don't tell you where to sell your output.
When Microsoft or Adobe give a way a publishing tool, then we can look at that argument. It's a nonsense and I'm loathe to even have to address it.
To my opening statement, the market is -wide open- to any other developer to sell a lowest common denominator publishing tool, and not require you sell through iBooks. Tough luck if you end up with something like the current process of using InDesign to essentially re-layout your gems for each ebook platform? That's the lot of those who strive to be the lowest.
There's no point in Apple dumbing down their free tool to make other manufacturers happy. It's not like being in the iBooks store is some kind of handicap. Sorry it's easy to use, creates great stuff and you only get to sell it in the best ebook market place. Boo hoo.
Anybody else is free to make whatever publishing tool they like. Author is not the only publishing tool for iBooks. Who seriously expects Apple to fix an entire industry of copycats and clunkers? Somebody else can have that headache and Apple's left it wide open.
I'm more interested in tasteful use of the technology. If each text book ends up 2GB, not many are going to fit on a 16GB iPad. Stuffing books with video and interactivity, might sound good at first, but too-busy and you'll lose your audience just as quickly as dull old text.
Mega productions are expensive and preferably rare. Let's hope the majority are just great books with a little bling to maintain interest. Give us stories about how cool Author is, and examples of simply great books (pun intended).
