iBooks Author: Awesome & Disappointing

According to many news headlines, Apple "made their bid today" for a larger presence in the self-publishing space with the introduction of iBooks Author, a Mac app that lets content creators do just that: create rich, interactive ebooks with a simple drag-and-drop interface. The new tool was launched at a New York press conference this morning, along with iBooks 2 and an upgraded iTunes U, both of which now feature enhanced textbook sections, as Apple follow up on Steve Jobs' desire to reinvent the education space with digital content.

But while iBooks Author does indeed look promising, it leaves a great deal to be desired, both in terms of functionality and accessibility, and one must question whether it can ever hope to achieve what these latest headlines are touting. While the Author app will likely prove more than adequate for the majority of book content creators, it's essentially a dot-to-dot, fill-in-the-blanks production tool, with templates that are bound to make a lot of its output look alike. For textbooks and most standard fiction this is fine, but it eliminates much of the creativity involved in making content with complex layouts. Based on the promotional images and video released today, it appears to handle full-page images with overlaid text to some degree, and the image word wrap function is impressive. But the font selections are limited to those available on the iPad, and interactivity is little more than simple pinch and zoom and standard tap functions that trigger events like photo galleries and videos. Rotating 3D models are interesting, in a limited way, but I'm curious to see how the glossary feature works, and there's a lot that can be done with layered images and some scripting if you know how (java and html code are allowed, but not something many authors are familiar with). But of course, I can't really know how well it works, since I'm unable to use it. Which brings me to my main point, concerning accessibility.

Source: netmarketshare.com

The primary mark against iBooks Author as a useful tool for content creators in general, and self-published authors specifically, is its immensely restricted availability: it's only being released through the Mac app store, for OS X Lion only (not even Apple's own iOS), leaving 93.6% of the world's computer users out of luck. Had Apple at least made it available as an iPad app they could have targeted well over half of the tablet market, particularly given that their Pages word processing app is already on there, providing authors with all the tools they might need to create rich content for the iBookstore right on their iPads. But with only 6.4% of computer users (and thus, one must infer, authors) having access to a Mac, one can hardly call this a "bid to own publishing's future," as today's L.A. Times business section put it. The figures are even more skewed in the education field that Apple seems to be aiming for here, with less than 5% of schools and offices using Macs.

Still, it's a really sweet looking piece of software which is bound to lure in at least a few new Mac OS users. I can say that with some certainty because I bought my first Mac today, in the form of a Mac Mini, which is about the cheapest you can get into an OS X product. I had been contemplating this for some time, not as a jump to Mac, or even because of this new app, but simply as the only practical means of uploading my content to the iBookstore when it's ready, since iTunes Connect is also only available for the Mac. People complain about the proprietary nature of Amazon's Kindle format (with some justification), but Apple is truly even worse, since you can at least read Kindle ebooks on other hardware via apps, and Mac users can create and upload Kindle content. Not so with Apple. With them it's Mac or nothing. Which is why they have just 4% of the ebook market currently, and will never come close to competing with Amazon in terms of publishing. They may sell a lot of tablets, but they'll never sell very many ebooks until they open up the platform to all of the people who produce them.

You can learn more about this new app and view a promo video on the iBooks Author page.