An author’s view of iBook Author
A New Way For Photographers To Self-Publish by scottbourne on the Photofocus site.
The key points:
- traditional publishers take a lot more than 30%
- tradtonal publishers want exclusivity
- it is really hard to get a book deal with traditional publishers
The iBook platform cuts through all that.
(Thanks to The MT show )
Why would you pay these people?
In 2015, however, Windows Phone will account for 16.7 percent of the smartphones shipped, up from less than 2 percent in 2011, according to the IHS iSuppli Mobile & Wireless Communications Service at information and analysis provider IHS (NYSE: IHS).
Somehow Windows phone is going to jump from 1.9% of the market in 2011 to 16.7 in 2015. How or why is not really explained in the article. There is a self referential quote by the author on the hotness of the Nokia 900 at CES and some support from a IHS co-worker.
What it really shows that IHS is not an information and analysis provider but a provider of public relations stories. Which is why I suppose you buy their services.
W3 standards offer no clear competitive advantage for iBooks
Daniel Glazman responds to John Gruber comments on proprietary HTML extensions. I just do not see any clear competitive advantage for Apple to provide a W3 standard compliant format for iBooks when the goal is to target just the iPad. The primary goal is to sell iPads and create a market around them not to sell primarily iBooks or ePubs or whatever.
Glazman: “Opening up everything and using only carefully chosen standards and matching the version of WebKit used by Safari would have given an immense and almost unbeatable competitive advantage to Apple, …” is just a standards religious statement of belief unfettered by actual business logic. In the real publishing world with some orientation to paper non-W3 standards such as DOC/DOCX and PDF are prevalent. Which means that people and businesses buy MS Word and Adobe Acrobat
This is supported by Daniel Glazman! : “MS Word remains the main format requested by Publishers all around the world, and it’s not going to change any time soon, …”
ASIDE: Glazman – …These days are over, and Microsoft finally embraced Web Standards and all rejoiced. Microsoft Sharepoint has lots of W3 standards technology and its really nasty to format and develop templates for. In contrast iBooks Author looks really nice to work with.
