“Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19,” Chris Foresman reports for Ars Technica.
“While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the ‘GarageBand for e-books,’ so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users,” Foresman reports.
Foresman reports, “Authoring standards-compliant e-books (despite some promises to the contrary) is not as simple as running a Word document of a manuscript through a filter. The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand. Our sources say Apple will announce such a tool on Thursday.”
Read more in the full article here.
Headline should have said “…Digitally Enhance” textbook publication.
It has been obvious this would come for a long time at least since Adobe Acrobat came on the scene. It just takes some company like Apple to put all the pieces together in one box to make it easier to accomplish all the tasks.
“(…) not as simple as running a Word document of a manuscript through a filter.”
I disagree that running Word is simple.
no lie..
Ever since that stupid ribbon, that’s one of the biggest complaints I hear about word.
Then again I use pages.
… user. Didn’t need it this past weekend, though.
Got a Word document in Mail, on my iPad, and it translated Just Fine! … in Mail. Used the iPad to “learn” my script, then as a “teleprompter” to help out in the dark hall. Looking forward to “translating” my wife’s plays to this new format.
cool.
Should have been Adobe. But they’re off fighting other battles and took their eyes off their core markets.
Should have been Adobe
Agreed. Adobe isn’t the same company it used to be. The Marketing Morons running the place these days must be banging their heads against the wall after hearing this rumor. Oops darn oops.
The GarageBand for ebooks will be…..
Drumroll…..
Pages ’12…..
There ya go!
i like the name “Drumroll”, for this
e-book generator.
Pages already can publish as
E-books and PDFs.
Preview is a sweet app on the Mac but it could be given some new enhancements to better create E-books – let those enhancements be DrumRoll.
Or not.
See P.E.D. at http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/17/apples-education-event-is-getting-seriously-over-hyped/ for an opinion that everyone is just regurgitation this article andit is all getting over hyped.
Been using Calibre. Anything new would have to be really good for me to make a change.
My read of this is the new app is to be an e-book creation tool with format conversion capabilities, rather than a library manager with format conversion capabilities.
Until now, Adobe InDesign has been the only real e-book creation program, but now that you can’t buy it (you can RENT it for $50 amonth!) Adobe is no longer viable.
There’s a reason the title makes no sense: they’re already backing away from this mistaken analogy.
I sure would appreciate a MUCH easier way to make ebooks. If you’ve never attempted it, seeing decent text on the kindle app that’s reasonably formatted is produced by an act of God (almost).
As a publisher, I’ve been unbelievably frustrated by how hard it is to make a nice ebook.
So true. And the lack of standards makes it worse. Kindle is bad enough, but when you try converting to ePub format, one retailer may accept it, but another reject it because of ridiculous stuff.
Apparently, Amazon already has some sort of e-book uploader. A friend recently published a children’s book by uploading images and text to their site.
And, couldn’t Apple really just use the same technology they use now for the books you order through iPhoto, except more text heavy and with better book templates?
This is the most amazing news today! It sounds like HyperCard is back but this time a bit more skilled… it can now publish the work and even maybe make some money off of it.
For those young ones… here is what HyperCard as it was discontinued in 2004:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
Cheers to Apple!