Tablet fever isn't going away, even though Apple has finally launched its iPad and the rumour-mongering can end. Indeed, there are new rumours of further Apple devices, in varying sizes (including larger) and with capabilities more like a laptop. And Google has shown off proof-of-concept images and video of its own device - or, at least, of the Chrome OS running on a tablet.
The latter is, perhaps, more intriguing. It's hardly a surprise that Apple is planning to launch more tablet models. For a start, it needs to address some of the shortcomings in the current iPad, such as lack of multitasking. And the response to the 'overgrown iPhone' clearly shows that there is a market desire (if not a demand) for a more capable, laptop-like device running a fuller version of OS X, rather than the iPhone OS (even if version 4 with multitasking might be ready soon).
Google's possible entry into this market might be a tad more significant, especially for those of us interested in e-books. The images, shown on the Chromium blog (Chromium being the project name for the Google Chrome OS and browser), simply show what the company's forthcoming OS might look like on a tablet. It's not a preview of an actual device. But it might be read as an expression of intent.
In Google's Chrome OS, the browser is the OS. Everything happens in the browser. Google is already making use of the features of HTML5 (which won't be finalised for some years) to create hybrid applications that blur the distinction between programs that run on your computer and those on the web. The online element is a key part of the experience and the functionality of the platform.
This is interesting in the light of the iPad. Tablet computers have been with us for years. But the majority took some flavour of Microsoft Windows and tried to squeeze this PC environment into a device clearly not suited to it. With the iPad, Appple has come from the opposite direction. Instead of attempting to put a PC on a tablet and then saying "see what you can do with this", it has asked "what do people want to do with a tablet?" and has provided those capabilities in a pleasurable and simple package.
No doubt, future iterations of the iPad will involve some degree of mission creep. But it's perfectly obvious that Apple is focusing on the experience that it believes people want.
An important part of that experience is reading books. And the iBooks app does for reading what iTunes did for music: it provides a single, integrated environment for browsing, sampling, buying, managing and using. And it does this by seamlessly integrating both the online and offline elements.
Enter Google. Its Chrome OS environment is ideal for creating these kinds of hybrid applications. Indeed, that's the entire basis of the operating system. One can easily imagine an application that provides both an e-book reader and a web browsing capability. And then you can add to this mix Google Books and the company's ongoing settlement with book rights holders. Now you have both the technology and the products for a major e-book platform.
Watch this space.
Many people in the book trade are wont to make the sign of the cross whenever Amazon's name is mentioned. The online bookseller is credited with forcing publishers to slash their prices - and their profit margins.
But a recent spat between Amazon.com and publisher Macmillan might be an indication of a change in the balance of power.
Macmillan announced that it was changing the way it worked with Amazon when it comes to e-books. Amazon, it said, would become a sales 'agent'. The effect would be to allow Macmillan to better dictate prices. Amazon responded by removing the 'buy' button from all of Macmillan's products available on Amazon.com.
It was a nasty moment. Unusually, however, it's Amazon that has given way.
According to some in the publishing world, Amazon's position as the world's leading online book retailer has made it somewhat arrogant. To boost its own profits, it forces publishers to offer major discounts. Of course, Amazon isn't the only retail player flexing its muscle in this way. Supermarkets have been doing the same, and as publishers can't get high up the bestseller list without supermarket sales, they have had to go along.
It seems that Amazon has been doing the same with e-books, and that proved the last straw for Macmillan. Amazon wants e-books priced at $9.99, even for new, bestselling titles. Such prices not only encourage more book sales, they also boost sales of the Kindle. Publishers would be happier with something like $14.99. The fight was on.
Amazon's surrender to Macmillan surprised a lot of people, even if it was accompanied by a somewhat snippy remark to the effect that Macmillan has a "monopoly" on its own books. (Well, duh.)
But is it any coincidence that this has all come to pass just after the launch of Apple's iPad? I think not.
Macmillan is one of the five major publishers who had signed up for the iBookstore by the time of the recent iPad launch. Now the company has another major online retail outlet and (what is bound to become) another popular e-book reader platform.
There are plenty of e-book readers out there. But Amazon, with the Kindle, had done the best job of providing an integrated browsing, buying and reading platform. Now Apple has a better one. So it's not just the Kindle that is threatened by the iPad - it's Amazon's grip on the book market.
Well, it's here. After months of hysteria and hype (not unconnected) Apple has launched its overgrown iPhone, the iPad tablet computer. And it's going to be a game-changer. But that's not because it's a revolutionary piece of hardware: in fact, in many ways it's only a step-change, and while it's undoubtedly sexy, as you'd expect from Apple, some may find it a little limited in functionality compared to, say, a laptop computer. No, the real significance is the way it changes the way we consume, the way we interact with media including the web and, more importantly, books.
For self-publishers, it is likely to herald a very important shift in the publishing ecosphere. As expected, the iPad comes with an e-book reader application, iBooks. Also, as expected, Apple is backing this with an online store. Five publishers were signed up to this by the time of the launch - Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachett. (Random House held back, as it did with the Kindle.)
What matters to the self-publisher, of course, is the ability of individuals to get on the virtual bookshelves alongside the big players. Amazon already makes that possible for the Kindle through its Digital Text Platform (DTP). Making your book available for the Kindle is as easy as uploading a Word file. If Apple does the same with iBooks, this will be great news for self-publishers. Why?
Well, self-publishers have difficulty competing with mainstream publishers on three counts:
E-books remove the first obstacle. With no manufacturing costs, e-books allow self-publishers to sell at the same price as mainstream publishers - or even cheaper, given their lack of overheads.
Distribution through the Kindle store or the iBooks store is automatic. No difference there between the bigger and smaller players.
That leaves mainstream publishers with just the one advantage - marketing. And let's face it, few of them are doing much of that for anyone but their A-list authors.
A suitable platform
There will be debates over the iPad's suitability as an e-book platform. Having a regular LCD screen, it's not as readable in sunlight as an e-ink display. It's somewhat harder on the eyes, too. But then the colour display offers greater potential. When books start to carry rich content, such as video, that will be important. Colour e-ink displays are on their way, but it may be a while before they can offer the vibrancy of the iPad's screen. Besides which, e-ink's emulation of paper probably matters more to
older generations. Young people don't have the same relationship with
paper we oldies have. Their relationship is with screens. Simulating
paper may not be a high priority for them.
And you can't get away from the fact that the iPad gives you a lot more than just an e-reader. For the price differential between it and the Kindle, you get a device that does so much more. Over the past few years, convergence has been the key tecnological trend. People don't want lots of individual devices, each doing a single, separate job. Consumers are accustomed to cellphones that also take photos, shoot video and allow you to email, tweet and browse the web. With the iPhone, Apple proved the popularity of additional applications - the iPhone App Store has around 140,000 now (all of which run on the iPad). People want their technology to do more. They might be willing to trade a little readability for that functionality.
Perhaps the iPad could have had more - a camera, for example. But it has enough extra functionality to put a clear distance between it and dedicated e-book readers.
One-click shopping
So how is Apple with its iPad going to beat Amazon with its Kindle? The answer lies in the integration of the whole process of buying and reading. Amazon has done a pretty good job of making it easy to get books on to your Kindle. But Apple has made it even faster and easier.
They've done this sort of thing before. The revolution in music was not the MP3 format. That just changed the nature of piracy, from home-taping to filesharing. The real revolution was the iPod. And again, it wasn't the hardware that changed the music world forever, it was the iTunes Music Store and the fact that access to it is built right into the iTunes software. The software you use to manage and listen to your music is the same software you use to browse the shop and buy. It's seamlessly integrated, a single process of consumption.
And so it is with iBooks.The software presents you with a bookshelf. Tap on a book and start reading. Want something else? One more tap and the bookshelf flips over to reveal a bookshop, right there in your hand. Within a minute or two (depending on connection speed) you can be reading a new book - all using the same application on the same device.
If Apple manages to do for books what it did for music, there will be one other benefit for self-publishers (indeed, all publishers).
The music business moans constantly about piracy. And we all know it's rife. And yet, the iTunes/iPod experience proved that people are still willing to pay for music at a reasonable price. In spite of the filesharing and illegal copying, enough people are happy to pay a euro for a track, especially given the convenience that Apple provides.
Publishers are rightly worried that the move to e-books will result in the same kind of piracy the music business has suffered. But, using Apple's model, we may find that there is still a viable business model in the midst of this.
And here's where self-publishers might gain an advantage. Publishers, like music companies, have high overheads. That's why authors only get around 10% of the cover price in royalties. The rest not only goes on marketing and manufacturing, but staff, offices, lunches and the rest.
Self-publishing is a lean operation, capable of operating on much lower margins. That means self-publishers can drop prices and ride out the effects of piracy much more easily than the large publishers.
Standard format
Interestingly, Apple has adopted the ePub format for the iBooks platform. That's fast becoming the de facto standard. Most e-book readers support it. Sony had its own proprietary format, but has since switched to ePub. Which well-known reader doesn't support ePub? That's right. The Kindle. (It also has poor PDF support.)
Suddenly, Amazon looks a tad isolated, with a proprietary e-book format and a reader that looks positively last-century alongside the iPad. Amazon's belated attempt to launch apps for the Kindle seems desperate, and still leaves the Kindle pretty much a one-trick pony.
A better ePub
Given that Smashwords will create an ePub file for us, from the Word document, why do we prefer to do this from InDesign?
The answer lies in how we create the file in InDesign. Rather than have one big file for the whole publication, we use InDesign's 'Book' feature. With this, you have a separate file for each chapter (plus, we use separate files for the title page, copyright page, etc), all managed from the book document.
When you output the ePub file, InDesign builds it in such a way that there are links created to each section. This is best explained in images. Here's the Lady Caine ePub e-book created via Smashwords, viewed in Adobe Digital Editions. Note the section on the left.
Now here's the ePub version we created via InDesign.
Note how the left-hand section has links to the separate chanpters. It's like an automatic contents page.
Formatting with Word
We need to deal with some formatting issues you might encounter with your Word document. Like the web, e-books present a challenge for designers who are used to controlling every aspect of the look and feel of a document.
E-readers are designed to give a great deal of control to the reader - how large the type is, and so on. But even if you keep formatting to a minimum, you may be in for some surprises when using a service like Smashwords, or Amazon DTP, or even when creating your own files with InDesign.
For a start, blank lines are stripped out. Gone. If you were using blank lines to separate sections of text, think again.
Our Word and InDesign templates are designed so that the text we flow into them has no blank lines at all. To provide space between text, we use paragraph styles. For example, in the following snippet from Lady Caine, the space between the chapter heading and the following text is achieved by creating a ChapterHead paragraph style with a 'space after' setting of 36pt.
Similarly, to separate sections of text, we created a TextBreak paragraph style, applied to a line of three asterisks, with 'space before' and 'space after' settings of 30pt.
That's why our Word and InDesign templates have a lot of paragraph styles.
If you try applying text centering, right-align or character attributes like bold and italics, you may find these don't work in the e-book file unless you define them as part of the paragraph or character style.
For example, let's say you have a 'BodyText' paragraph style which is normally ranged-left, roman font. If you just click the 'align right' button on Word's toolbar, it'll align right in Word, but will still be aligned left in the e-book. What you need to do is create a new paragraph style called, say, 'BodyTextRight' and apply that.
Similarly, if you highlight a word and click the button to make it bold, it won't be bold in the e-book. Instead, you'll need to create a character style in which bold is selected and apply that.
The Smashwords Style Guide advises against creating multiple paragraph styles, but we've simply ignored this and it's worked fine for us. That said, the simpler you can make your book, the easier a time you'll have during production.
OpenOffice issues
Finally, a warning: not all Word files are equal. When we started using Smashwords, we were outputting Word (.doc) files from OpenOffice, our preferred WP. This largely seemed to work except for some irritating faults. In spite of all those carefully created paragraph formats, text that we'd centered or right-aligned in the Word file were still left-aligned in the ePub document created by Smashwords. And there were other, smaller glitches.
Now, Microsoft is very secretive about the details of the .doc format, and so OpenOffice has had to reverse engineer it. It occured to me that maybe they hadn't got it quite right.
And so it seems.
The same file, loaded into Word and resaved, now works as expected. You may find similar issues with other word processing packages that claim to output Word files.
Resources:
All self-publishing authors should consider producing e-book versions of their work. In fact, there's a good argument to say that you should regard the e-book as the primary format these days. But how do you go about creating the e-book? Here's how we do it at WebVivant Press.
Which format?
The first question to ask yourself is, which e-book formats are you going to target? For my money, the main contenders are:
There are other formats, including plain text, Word and RTF, but these are the most important.
How to publish
Next, let's consider how you publish your e-book. There are two aspects to this: 1) Creating the e-book file itself; and 2) Making it available to the buying public, handling orders etc.
You can create your own e-book file and make it available for download from your site. We're investigating this for WebVivant Press, using Google Checkout for handling orders. In the meantime, we've decided to use three services.
Designing the workflow
All of these services allow you to upload your book as a Word or RTF file. So, problem sorted. Except that that doesn't quite fit with our workflow.
With our first book, Lady Caine, we used a Word file to upload to Lulu. (My experiences with RTF over the years haven't been entirely happy. So RTF plays no part in this post. If you have experiences using RTF files, I'd be happy to hear about them.) But there were problems.
Although I used Lulu's own template for the page size we'd chosen, the text reflowed slightly, causing widows and orphans. It may have been a font issue, or the fact that the Word file was created from OpenOffice (more of which later). Either way, it was annoying. Besides which, word processor software isn't ideal for laying out books.
Our preference, then, and the method we use now, is to layout the print version using Adobe InDesign. This gives us much finer control over the appearance of the book. And from InDesign, we can easily create PDF and ePub versions. In fact, the ePub versions produced this way are superior to those we get from Word files, as we'll see in Part 2. Lulu accepts ePub files for its e-book service, so we can use the same InDesign file for the print version, the Lulu e-book and PDF.
But this doesn't get around the fact that we'll still need the book as a Word file for Smashwords and Amazon DTP. Maintaining two versions is a pain - late changes have to be made to both copies. But so far I haven't found a better solution. We've alleviated that issue to some degree by adopting the following workflow:
In Part 2, we'll look at some of the issues you might encounter when creating your e-book.
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