Never before has an proclamation about textbooks been the field of study of so much conversation . But that ’s what happens when Apple holds a media event : People babble , even if the guinea pig might otherwise seem obscure or uninteresting .
One of the openhanded misconceptions I run into is the premise that grow iOS apps is light . It ’s not . It ’s unvoiced , and expert iOS developer are extremely severe to come up . particularly ( take it from me ) if you ’re a publishing company with little or no experience with ( or focus on ) app development . The bottom telephone circuit is , find gifted iOS developers is voiceless and developing iOS apps is expensive .
Somewhere along the way , I think Apple begin a little blinded by the sheer gaudiness of some of the earliest media apps for the iPad . On the powder store side , it was Popular Mechanics . On the Christian Bible side , awful books - as - apps like The ingredient . There are some really noteworthy book and clip apps out there , ones that are truly a merging of world - stratum content with innovative , sheer - edge software system development .
But most publishing companies are not choke to be able to match those sterling example . For every blindingly awe-inspiring mass medium - company iPad app , there are a few XII low - to - average quality apps . The contentedness may still be great , but they just do n’t have the cognition or expertise or budget to work up their own apps .
There are also a bunch of companies burgeon forth up that specify in building apps and then renting them out to media companies , so they can pour their depicted object inside . This clobber can be pretty expensive ( more than many struggling medium companies can stomach ) , and since they ’re one - size of it - fits - all approaches , they ’re normally more generic than cutting edge .
So you ’re Apple , and you ’re looking at the iPad as the gadget that ’s going to revolutionize reading . You ’ve got book apps that you screw like The Elements , but there just are n’t very many of them . On the other side of the spectrum , you ’ve draw a whole lot of books in the iBookstore , but they ’re all essentially monotonous files of text — in other tidings , they ’re not very compelling . They certainly do n’t show off the unique power of the iPad .
What ’s the barrier to make more stuff like The Elements , rather than plain - textbook books that might as well be on a Kindle ? growing cost . If the desktop - publishing revolution had required every newspaper , clip , and record publishing house to write their own calculator package for lay out varlet , that revolution would n’t have hap — and yet that ’s been the situation when it descend to iPad media apps . What force that gyration was the institution of relatively sleazy , readily available tools that let publishing firm take reward of their institutional strengths ( design , writing , redaction , photography , art ) while eliminating a Brobdingnagian technical barrier .
I ’ve already told you that it ’s unbelievably unvoiced and expensive to build iOS apps . The current res publica of involvement in the ebook - work up reality is not much better . Some print - oriented pecker such as Adobe InDesign have been retrofit to output to ebook data formatting , but the quality of that end product is not great . A few writing apps ( Pages and Scrivener , to name two ) will export to ePub , but their output is also a act special and a bit generic . And then there are the open - source peter , such as Sigil , which conflate functionality with godawful exploiter interface .
There ’s also the fact that there are lots of books thataren’ttextbooks that could habituate more interactivity and nerveless plan . Apple knows this , and has been beating the drumfish of interactive books in the iBookstore for some time . I ’m certain the creator of children ’s book of account , life story , informative technology books , and even novel would love to have an improved elbow room to create their books .
Here ’s the part that fascinate me most , as a guy who do work for a mag as well as a website . Book publishers have it easy : They ’ve had a standard format ( ePub ) they could build for in gild to make headway access code to the iPad via the iBookstore . The tools to create those single file are lousy , but it can be done . You do n’t have to enthrone decade or hundreds of thousands of clam in app development to get your books on the iPad .
It ’s a altogether different narrative for magazine and newspaper publishing company . There ’s no iBookstore for newspapers and magazines . Apple ’s Newsstand , introduce in iOS 5 , does n’t provide any simple , standardized formatting for create newspapers or cartridge . If you need to be in Apple ’s Newsstand , you have to pay for expensive iOS development — and for most newspaper publisher the solution will be a fair app . ( As someone who is correct in the centre of this forMacworld , let me tell you : The choice are n’t great and they are n’t cheap . )
[ Jason Snell is Macworld ’s editorial manager . ]
