iBooks Author tools a real waste

[huebi]

What does all this have to do with Sigil?

[KevinH]

Hi,

I put it in this forum because IBooks Author was a tool like Sigil that produces ebooks that according to early reports would support epub3 (but does not). As such I thought people who use Sigil wold be interested in trying it and wanted to give them a head's up about its serious drawbacks and constraints.

You are correct and this discussion has wandered more than a bit and could / should probably be moved to General Discussion and out of this topic.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

Did you reply to the wrong post?
I have absolutely no idea what relevance your reply has to what I said, which wasn't about devices, but formats and tools.

Originally Posted by murraypaul

What led you to believe it would do that?
You seem to be complaining that a tool described and designed solely to produce books for iThings does exactly that. Might as well complain that Amazon's KF8 tools don't produce ePub 3 files either, all three formats are basically the same.

You mentioned iThings which is a reference to the devices. The apps are NOT the devices. Refer to the apps, not the devices. You overgeneralize and are wrong when you do so. What iBooks can and cannot do is not all the devices can and cannot do. Different apps do different things. So refer to the apps you are talking about. The way you said it, you make it out that what iBooks can and cannot do is all the devices can and cannot do. Now if you do not understand that, I feel sorry for you.

[Fabe]

Originally Posted by huebi

What does all this have to do with Sigil?

1. They are both software programs that aid you in producing electronic books.

2. One is a closed system (.ibook) for output to one device.

3. One is an open system (.epub) for output to any any device capable of reading .epub files.

4. One is maintained by an individual.

5. One is controlled by a company with 400 billion dollars in the bank.

6. Users are free to choose either, neither, or both.

- Fabe

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You mentioned iThings which is a reference to the devices. The apps are NOT the devices. Refer to the apps, not the devices. You overgeneralize and are wrong when you do so. What iBooks can and cannot do is not all the devices can and cannot do. Different apps do different things. So refer to the apps you are talking about. The way you said it, you make it out that what iBooks can and cannot do is all the devices can and cannot do. Now if you do not understand that, I feel sorry for you.

I said (as you just quoted): "You seem to be complaining that a tool described and designed solely to produce books for iThings does exactly that."

What is wrong with that?
It is a tool designed solely to produce books for iThings.
I said nothing at all about what iBooks can do, the discussion is about iBooks Author. You seem to be the one having a problem understanding things.

[McDave]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Instead, what I found was a blatant attempt to embrace and destroy the epub3 spec

iBooks Author ignores ePub. How can you embrace something by ignoring it? Replace perhaps but not embrace.

[McDave]

Originally Posted by KevinH

...the bottom line is this product as designed is truly a waste of time. What people seem to keep missing is that it ONLY can produce textbooks for the iPad (iBooks 2 in textbook mode will not work on any other device). Why on earth would we want every student tied to using an iPad just to get access to textbooks?

What other tablet computer is actually selling? Should students be buying an eBook reader and a tablet computer? Is creating content for a distribution system that mainlines directly into 50 million+ customers (growing by 5m every month) who've demonstrated they'll spend money a waste of anyone's time?

iBooks are way beyond textbooks and way beyond anything ePub delivers.

[Serpentine]

A new user, two posts in a row, "Device: iPad"

Defending Crapple.

How ~straaaange~

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by McDave

What other tablet computer is actually selling? Should students be buying an eBook reader and a tablet computer? Is creating content for a distribution system that mainlines directly into 50 million+ customers (growing by 5m every month) who've demonstrated they'll spend money a waste of anyone's time?

iBooks are way beyond textbooks and way beyond anything ePub delivers.

Warning, my reply has nothing to do with Sigil:

Oh, horsepucky. I should know. We create tons of books that get sold on iBooks. iBooks isn't some magic carpet. Yes, it can display video. It can play audio. After that, it's basically an ePUB. YES, you can create a fixed-format kids' book for it. And YES, you can "embed" PDF's in it--but at the end of the day, you still only have x for real-estate (to see those PDF's).

But I'll tell you what you CAN'T do: you can't create a market for it. We have 700+ authors in our client list, a shocking number NYTimes-bestsellers, Edgar winners + nominees, Macavity winners, Cristy winners--and you know what they're selling on the iBooks platform? BUPKUS. So it can be as whiz-bang as you think it is, but nobody with iPads buys BOOKS, padawan. Apparently they're all too busy watching YouTube. (Yes, that was unwarrantedly snarky--but trust me, I know what's selling where, I get to hear about it all day.) They buy APPS and GAMES and other goodies--but I kid thee not, they do NOT buy books.

I have a client who spent $1500 (yes, FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS) creating fixed-format books for iBooks for a YA market. She's made sweet nothing on iBooks, but she's selling like CRAZY on Amazon, with a plain-old, plain-old mobi.

It's all well and good to go bonkers being artsy-fartsy or putting fleurons in your book, or embedding audio of yourself reading your own poetry (yep, have some of those too!!), but at the end of the day:

publishing is a business.

And you have to be able to sell books. So, sure, get on here and rave about the iPad. I have one myself. It does a lot of things really well; some not so great. But its book market is, in a word:

DISMAL.

So let's not forget that what you make, you WANT to sell. Unless you're deranged. So iAuthor might be the greatest thing since Garageband or edible undies, but you still gotta be able to sell the product. B&N consistently outsells Apple, in the ePUB market, by a HUGE margin.

JMHO, based on 3 years in this biz, and several thousand books selling on everything from Diesel to BooksOnBoard to B&N to Apple to Amazon...

Hitch

[Fabe]

Originally Posted by Hitch

... you know what they're selling on the iBooks platform? BUPKUS ...

Hitch - my publishing catalog is not as big as yours, but the books I represent sell 15 times more in the iBookstore than Amazon. I love the iBookstore.

It would be interesting to se a serious study on what sells and where. - Fabe

[st_albert]

At the risk of becoming an accomplice in the hijack of this thread, the publisher I work for publishes mostly fiction in a wide variety of genres, plus a few non-fiction. With few exceptions, they are not used as textbooks. So, no need for fancy fixed formats, audio, dancing bears, etc. Seldom even tables or interior illustrations.

The ebooks are distributed via Apple, Amazon, B&N, Fictionwise, and several other distributors. Guess who the big winner is?

We sell more through Amazon than all others combined, by a factor of 5 - 10.

Seems like we read of a new "Kindle Millionaire" every couple of weeks. I've yet to hear of the first iBooks Millionaire.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by st_albert

At the risk of becoming an accomplice in the hijack of this thread, the publisher I work for publishes mostly fiction in a wide variety of genres, plus a few non-fiction. With few exceptions, they are not used as textbooks. So, no need for fancy fixed formats, audio, dancing bears, etc. Seldom even tables or interior illustrations.

The ebooks are distributed via Apple, Amazon, B&N, Fictionwise, and several other distributors. Guess who the big winner is?

We sell more through Amazon than all others combined, by a factor of 5 - 10.

Seems like we read of a new "Kindle Millionaire" every couple of weeks. I've yet to hear of the first iBooks Millionaire.

Yes, my numbers are much like Albert's--we sell a consistent 88-92% on Kindle, and 8-11% on Nooks, and everyone else--EVERYONE, including Apple--fight over that remaining 2/10ths of 1 percent ort remaining on the table.

I agree--I don't want to hijack this poor guy's thread. I'd be happy to discuss this someplace more appropriate, like the Lounge or what-have-you. As cranky as I get about basic CSS & html questions posed on this particular forum, it's hypocritical for me to wander off topic in such far-flung areas.

So: Fabe, it's hard for me to discuss intelligently without knowing what your genre is, if it's so defined? I mean, if you publish in 1-2 genres only? I know that, for example, sci-fi sells very well on iBooks and/or Wattpad, comparatively speaking. And of course, Comics, albeit on the appropriate comix apps. AND, naturally, anything that's image-heavy, or classifiable as a "coffee-table book;" in fairness those in that genre that we've done do, for obvious reasons, sell significantly better in iBooks than elsewhere--but they don't sell that great, period, compared to their DT counterparts.

Lounge, or do we all want to drop it and let the poor OP have his/her thread back?

Hitch

[Fabe]

Originally Posted by KevinH

As a professor, I was quite interested and downloaded the new iBooks Authoring tool hoping to be able to see how it compares with Sigil and possibly use it to produce valid epub3.

Instead, what I found was a blatant attempt to embrace and destroy the epub3 spec

* iBooks Author will not even load an epub (or any version)
* iBooks author will not let you publish to anywhere but the IBook Store
* if you export to "iBooks" you will get a completely bastardized epub with its own mimetype file "application/x-ibooks+xip" that has the same basic layout as an epub but that seems to use its own fixed format layout and has lots of Apple extensions.

To see all of this, Go to the Mac App Store and download iBook Author.app for free and then open one of its templates and export it to iBooks format.

The results .iBooks file can be unzipped to see how badly they have bastardized the epub format.

A real shame.

Oh well.

Back to the OP ...

Yes, .ibook is a proprietary format by Apple. This does not stop anyone from creating ePubs without iAuthor and uploading them to the Apple bookstore AND selling then in other bookstores too. - Fabe

[JeremyWkemp]

This is a very helpful post. I dug pretty deeply into the epub format here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvGrFZdSDww and just yesterday posted the first self-published iBook Author book for sale on the iTunes store - "Dr. Kemp's Kid's Love Bugs." I'm still a little queasy about the Embrace/Extend tactic that Apple is using against the epub format. But these Keynote interactives are way cool to have in a book. My next goal is to work in some Collada models from Blender/Sketchup and then to see if I can get DashCode from crashing in Lion. The prospect of widgets in an iPad book is just salivating stuff.

Originally Posted by KevinH

As a professor, I was quite interested and downloaded the new iBooks Authoring tool hoping to be able to see how it compares with Sigil and possibly use it to produce valid epub3.

Instead, what I found was a blatant attempt to embrace and destroy the epub3 spec

* iBooks Author will not even load an epub (or any version)
* iBooks author will not let you publish to anywhere but the IBook Store
* if you export to "iBooks" you will get a completely bastardized epub with its own mimetype file "application/x-ibooks+xip" that has the same basic layout as an epub but that seems to use its own fixed format layout and has lots of Apple extensions.

To see all of this, Go to the Mac App Store and download iBook Author.app for free and then open one of its templates and export it to iBooks format.

The results .iBooks file can be unzipped to see how badly they have bastardized the epub format.

A real shame.

Oh well.