From Paidcontent.org: "Startup iPad publisher Inkling has just launched a free, cloud-based, interactive e-book publishing platform, Inkling Habitat.
Inkling Habitat is a program for professional publishers producing e-books at scale, and a way to make a very expensive process more affordable.
Inkling Habitat lets publishers create interactive e-books with HD video, interactive features and 3D content in a free, cloud-based program.
E-books can immediately be published to iPad and the Web in HTML5, with updates pushed to both platforms at once. (Well, iPad is available now and Web publishing will be added later this year.)
Multiple groups can collaborate on the content simultaneously and every version of a publication is saved, so changes can always be rolled back.
The program is free, but in order to use it publishers must agree to make the books they create with it available through Inkling’s store (in its iPad app and on its website). Inkling takes a cut of the revenues from those books. Unlike with iBooks Author, publishers can also sell the books they create through other channels (their own websites or as individual apps, for instance) and Inkling does not take a cut of those sales."
From the article: "While all of these publishing options are great, you’ll soon find that the formatting differences will drive you absolutely nuts.
Each format has it’s idiosyncrasies and numerous options.
You can literally spend days fine tuning your document for one particular application only to find that it completely changes when viewed on a different device.
Your book will look completely different on the small screen of a cell phone, than it does on the larger screen of an iPad or other tablet.
I spent the last month formatting my printed book, The Path of Consequence, for Kindle, iPad and Nook. It seemed easy at first, but as I viewed my document in the different formats I was horrified at the results.
Through trial and error I found some solutions and came to some conclusions.
Here are the three common formats and some workarounds."
From the article: "The app, which made its official debut Monday, offers a simple and straightforward ebook reading experience for all of your ePub files unencumbered by Digital Rights Management (DRM).
This includes most free ePub files available around the web, including those from Project Gutenberg, Tidbits’s Take Control Books, and Macworld’s own line of Superguides.
You may be able to open books downloaded from the iBookstore as well, depending on whether or not the publisher has decided to add DRM during the publishing process.
...
You can add multiple books to your Bookle library and browse each book's TOC through clicks or keyboard commands; actual books are laid out in scrollable form, like a website, with breaks for chapters and pages."
Robin Good: PressBooks is a new book publishing platform, built on WordPress, that makes it easy to collaborate with an editorial team, and to generate clean, well-formatted books in multiple outputs: .epub, Kindle, print-ready PDF, InDesign-ready XML, and of course HTML.
"PressBooks is a digital-first book publishing tool built on WordPress that integrates a set of rules for encoding, transporting and storing documents in machine-readable formats, with emphasis on simplicity, usability and accessibility, particularly over the Internet.
PressBooks also makes a web version of all books — which can be private (for production only), or public (free or behind a paywall).
PressBooks, a Montreal-based start-up, is the brainchild of Hugh McGuire, a writer and web-developer and a co-founder of Book Oven, a cloud-based publishing tool that allows people to collaborate in writing, editing and proofreading a book, all through online tools.
He’s also the founder of LibriVox.org, an all-volunteer project whose aim is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.
It was once hailed as “perhaps the most interesting collaborative cultural project this side of Wikipedia.”
* Authors and Very Small Publishers can use PressBooks for free – we make great ebooks and typeset print books.
* Big and Small Publishers can use PressBooks as a lightweight, but extremely powerful (XML) workflow tool to output ebooks and typeset print books, for free.
The first book published using the PressBooks platform is Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, published by O’Reilly Media.
"Along with O’Reilly Media, another big-name player seems sold on the project. Harvard Business Review Press has produced and published an ebook using PressBooks."
From the article intro: "If evolution is the cornerstone of life, that's certainly no less true in the electronic world. If you can't adapt — or fail to adapt in time — you're destined to join the ranks of the Netscape Navigators, OS/2 operating systems, and WordPerfect office suites of the world, as a warning to future technology developers that nothing lasts forever, and never in its original form.
In this light, EPUB 3 is more than just bug fixes and tweaks from the last version; it represents a major change in what an ebook can be. It's a whole new beast, you might say.
The ebook market has been going through its own kind of hyper-evolution in the mere four years since EPUB2 was released, and a flurry of new devices and document formats have come and gone in that time.
E Ink technology was all the rage in 2007 when Adobe, Amazon, Sony, and others were entering the market, however, and EPUB2 arrived to meet the new needs of these portable reading devices, with improved presentation capabilities, better navigation, support for DAISY accessibility features, and some advances in global language support.
But EPUB2, like its predecessor and contemporaries, remained a static format, in that its core only allowed for the reading of basic text and image documents."
Robin Good: Booktype is a free, colaborative open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted both for print and for all the major ebOkk formats and stores online.
Booktype is characterized by a very easy-to-use interface and by its native collaborative set of features, supporting in the best possible way the cooperative creation of literary works by niche communities of interest.
Booktype key features include:
• clean, easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface
• simultaneous editing
• live chat and messaging tools
• output to pdf, epub, mobi, odt and html
• export to Amazon, iBooks, Lulu.com and other print-on-demand or ebook stores
• collaborative tools to engage proofreaders, editors and contributors
• merged print and digital workflow to keep books up-to-date across all platforms
• individual book history, versions, clones, editing permissions and license management
• easy import of content, chapters and entire books from other sources for remix and reuse
• Booktype uses WebKit, the open source project that powers Google’s Chrome browser and Apple’s iBooks app. This ensures great looking content across all mobile, tablet and ereader platforms, plus makes designing books easy for anyone with knowledge of web design.
From the article: "Check out this chart, which compares the features of Apple iBooks Author with seven other self-publishing tools available to independent writers."
From the article intro: "Ebook sales will be $9.7 billion in 2016, more than three times this year’s $3.2 billion in sales, according to a recent report by Juniper Research.
Online publishers and ebook distributors offer a growing opportunity to authors and small publishers, as well as affiliate marketers.
Here is a list of ebook publishing resources. There are mainstream ebook stores, as well as ebook aggregators, which provide a gateway to retailers.
Aggregators may offer additional services besides distribution, such as design, formatting, and marketing."
From the article: "The release by Apple of iBooks Author last month begins a year that will see the release of several new tools focused on helping people to create, publish and track their ebooks....
That’s fine insofar as it goes, but if you’re an author or publisher wanting to reach as many people as possible, with limited time and resources to repurpose the same content for different marketplaces, iBooks Author isn’t a great help."
What's interesting instead is the fact that in 2012 we will see more and more tools that will allow you to convert, format and publish your content to ebooks on multiple and competing platforms.
There are several services providing this and more springing up.
Not only.
You will have tools to track stats of how many ebooks are downloaded and purchased as well as better tools to write, edit, revise and format your ebook.
Robin Good: Epub converter allows you to convert pdf, doc and other types of documents and e-books to EPUB format. 2epub is 100% free online converter.
2EPUB allows you to convert PDF, doc and other types of documents & books to ePub format, the standard format for ebooks, supported by almost every reading device including iPad, iPhone, iPod, Sony Reader, BeBook, Nook, Kobo (for Kindle use .mobi).
Nothing to download. Simply upload your files directly on this page by using the "Browse" button.
Robin Good: Booktango is a new eBook publishing service which allows you to edit, format, layout and distribute/sell your publication across major online eBook stores such as Amazon, Apple, Sony, Kobo and more.
Booktango has a free version as well as richer offerings too. The free plan includes: - Free ISBN Assignment - Online E-Book Editor - Free Cover Design Service (Beta only) - Sell Through Major Retailers
(You receive 100% of net royalties when you make sales through the Booktango bookstore and 90% when you make a sale through any of our distribution and retail partners.)
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