[Fugubot]

I feel the bigger impact of Apple's announcement is to cast light on the paucity of simple text-to-epub authoring tools for Windows. Apple's offering is software to allow a broader audience to create both mass audience ebooks but also targetted ebooks for education, business training, church groups, etc. The proprietary format includes drm and offers Apple's device ecosystem in exchange for a 30% cut. But you can also export to pdf for targetted audiences. You won't have the media capabilities but you will have output that looks like an ebook in a widely accessible format.

Apple has consolidated the necessary functions (importing assets, basic editing, formatting appropriate for ebooks) into ONE program, in contrast to the common windows practice of juggling multiple programs to get from text to ebook. Sigil is the closest but its code-monkey design limits its broad appeal.

I'm a little surprised by the the discussion of media and interactivity here when in the windows world its still a theoretical proposition, assuming you are not hand-coding to epub3. InDesign will certainly support these standards eventually but it won't be free, will be more complex to use, and will remain priced beyond the reach of the audience that Apple is targetting.

There seems to be a lot of passion regarding how to handle media and interactivity even though well designed but affordable tools to create even epub2 ebooks are scarce.