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Wheat,
I have InDesign and its workflow is akin to the old Pagemaker or Quark. The innovation that Apple appears to be making with their new tool is that it's a tool that does not require a degree in design to produce nice output and with media support to boot (in its proprietary format). InDesign would really be overkill for most teachers and business people. The learning curve is prohibitive.
Apple recognizes there is a use for targetted ebooks, whether for a classroom, business training, church groups, etc. But it looks like only Apple is providing tools aimed at a general audience.
Apple always has an eye on supporting its hardware sales. Good for them. But you overstate when you say it supports only one output format. It has a default format but includes support for other formats including pdf (I believe without the media)--not as desirable as standard epub, but not a horrible alternative. So output is not as locked in as one would imagine for software that is free.
What would a comparable workflow be on a windows machine?
Word processors such as MS Word are not great at formatting longer documents and printing them to pdf often leads to unexpected formatting in the PDF. Images shift, text breaks in odd places, fonts in fields will change, formatting and page numbers in sections will change, etc. I haven't updated Word since 2003 so I don't know if it now allows saving to directly epub format. If it does not, how hard could this be given that MS Word format is based on xml? Pessimistically, I don't see Microsoft ever dedicating its resources to fixing the wysiwyg and unpredictable output issues. Their implementation of "sections" is terrible. To create a decent looking epub using Word as a starting point is a world of hurt. Is there a better word processor for handling formatting issues?
But at least windows programs can print to pdf. To edit formatting in PDF, users can go to Acrobat Professional or similar products. Not free and Adobe's product is very expensive. Again to fix formatting issues, the expectation is that you edit the pdf format code. Early reviews of the Apple software say their authoring tool's ui, its ease of importing assets such as keynote files, etc., are much more elegant than Windows word processors and pdf editors and yet is sufficiently powerful for the majority of users to produce an ebook.
To run Apple's software, you need an Apple computer. This was the prompt for my original post: Is there a comparable epub authoring tool for Windows? Is there an equivalent alternative?
The answer appears to be "no."
At the high end, there's InDesign which is a great and evolving product but its not comparable in terms of cost and its not user-friendly. Its a professional tool, while Apple is shooting for a much broader audience. At the low-end, there's Sigil, which is geared towards xml coders. Free and admirably produced by its dedicated author but not comparable. Jason Snell of MacWorld dubbed its interface recently as "godawful". Most of the free tools on windows are aimed at coders, and Apple again seems to be aiming for a broader audience by producing better designed software.
Scrivener for Windows is limited but, only recently out of beta, I'm liking it the most for creating epubs. Very nice as a composition tool and it outputs to epub. You do not need to juggle multiple programs to correct formatting problems. Handling separate parts of a book is head and shoulders better than Sigil. The epubs look good and you can futz with the format code. At 40 bucks, its not free but it's a real bargain. It's not as powerful as Apple's authoring software by all reports but it is the most direct route from text to ebook that I'm aware of on the Windows platform. It makes it simple to add Cover art, metadata, etc., during the export to epub procedure.
Apple's recent media event has shown that there is a gaping hole among the current line-up of Windows epub authoring tools. Even without Apple's proprietary multimedia extensions, there is nothing comparable to an easy to use text-to-epub tool for Windows.
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