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Comment by gdilla | Hacker News Reader

The apple specific nature of this new authoring platform is a departure from the eBook ePub standard, presumably because Apple thought the UX of eBooks could be way better. A similar rationale for why they introduced iOS apps, how it outperforms mobile web, to the ire of many developers who prefer to work with build once, run everywhere environments.

If you make a killer textbook in the new iBook Author tool, you can't publish it for the Kindle Fire. Contrast that to ePub, a file you could deliver to B&N, Apple, Amazon (they require some weird conversion process), etc, and it would be more or less available to all.

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I'm probably going to get downvoted for this but I'll say it anyway: there isn't a tablet market, there is only an ipad market. Apple want to make it easier to make books for ipads because: 1. that's what they sell and 2. that's what people are buying.

A quick aside, my mom is a 7th grade reading/writing teacher in a small (around 18K in the county) west-TN town. Her little school has an ipad cart. Every student does their writing (typing really) on an ipad. Both kids and teachers love it. The news today will probably thrill all of them.

I would have been more inclined to agree until the Kindle Fire came out. That is starting to change things.

I don't have a Kindle Fire, but I imagine it isn't very useful for textbooks. Thinking back to my school days, textbooks were huge and closer to the size of an iPad than to a Fire. The Fire's screen is great for blocks of text, but it's way too small to clearly display charts and tables.

In landscape mode it should be able to fit a decent sized chart or table on screen.

Next to the relevant text section, as with a paper textbook?

No, but that would be tough on the current iPad as well, given the relatively low resolution compared to printed books.

I really don't think a chart/video next to some explanatory text would tax an iPad screen. News websites often use a similar layout and work fine.

>there isn't a tablet market, there is only an ipad market.

There is certainly a laptop market. It would make sense to make the books compatible with the devices students already have.

Who cares though. That's like arguing over which paper stock is the most prevalent in the market today and then putting the manufacturer of that paper stock in the driver's seat of the publishing industry.

The iPad rules now.. but maybe net-books will make a miraculous comeback soon. Or maybe some other kind of device will take over.. flexible digital displays? Is there anything sooo complex about a textbook (even a digitally super-duper fancy one) that really can't be done on a platform that will adapt to any device? (aka the internet)

It's worth mentioning that EPUB3 is based on HTML5 and supports scripting - http://idpf.org/epub/30/spec/epub30-overview-20111011.html#s...

Of course, if you need more reasons for a switch to EPUB3, it also has brilliant accessibility and will be supported by a multitude of readers, not just iDevices.

Thanks for that reminder. We might see iBooks versus all other vendors using EPUB3 then.

I'd have to disagree with you on the build once, run everywhere philosophy. If you're talking about mobile apps, there's really no such thing. And textbooks (at least as Apple sees them) are a subset of mobile apps.

It takes specialized environment to make a device specific application and now text book. However, I have read that Apple is keen on ePub 3 standard so perhaps we'll see an export function to make an ePub 3 formatted book in the future. Right now, the iBook Author tool seems to have only PDF as the export function.

It also exports an ".ibooks" file, which is an epub file with a different filename extension. This is the file that gets shipped to ibooks.

It looks like standard epub, with some additional files (so it _should_ degrade.)

Apple put some ncx extensions (looks like thumbnails) into a separate file, and referenced it from a meta tag in the .ncx file. They added their usual com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml file, that they have for their fixed-layout epubs, but I think they're using CSS for layout in the new files.

The xhtml/css generated from their app doesn't render well in a browser or calibre. I suspect that's because of their use of avant-garde css features (e.g. @page ). I think these files would be able to degrade to other epub readers with some css tweaks.

"You may distribute books created in iBooks Author free of charge on your own website. If you wish to sell your book, you must do so through the iBookstore." http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5071#3

Does that mean you can't charge money for your output unless it's through the iBookstore? In other words, you couldn't publish for-purchase work to other eBook stores like Kindle?

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