Wishing on an ePub: Five hopes for Apple's rumored e-publishing software

#1 Macworld

Story Poster

Group: MW Bot
Posts: 31,666
Joined: 30-November 07

Posted 18 January 2012 - 02:46 PM

Post your comments for Wishing on an ePub: Five hopes for Apple's rumored e-publishing software here

#2 barrylium

Member

Group: Members
Posts: 21
Joined: 02-April 09

Posted 18 January 2012 - 03:06 PM

Good suggestions. I have an idea for an instructional cookbook that I'd like to produce, but not if I have to use all the software tools you have to plow through for MacWorld.

#3 WallyW

Newbie

Group: Macworld Insiders
Posts: 3
Joined: 16-June 10

Posted 18 January 2012 - 03:22 PM

All good comments. I'd also like to see multiple tables in the front matter. A List of Figures and/or List of Examples for example.

#4 sensel

Member

Group: Members
Posts: 92
Joined: 15-June 11

Posted 18 January 2012 - 03:32 PM

Apple has this App Store thing on every Mac. But many apps I would like are only sold on iTunes for iPhones and iPads!
So I agree, not only Apple needs to get this on Macs but also other app makers are really missing out on this. Particularly with the cloud. It would makes sense for apps on ALL devices to talk with each other. If your partner updates a shopping list while sitting at home on a Mac, it will just update on all the devices. I'm thinking of something like a regular shopping list type of app for iPad and iPhone. There are probably many more people with iPhones and Macs at home than iPhones and iPads at home.
But the list goes on. Many times I have just wanted to use an app and there was no version for the Mac but there was one for Android or, gack, Blackberry or Windows.

#5 flowney

Member

Group: Members
Posts: 625
Joined: 14-March 04

Posted 18 January 2012 - 03:43 PM

You are certainly right about iBooks on MacOS X or built into Pages or anything that will allow a round-trip experience between how it looks in the client app and how it will look on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch using iBooks. I cannot recall how many times I have wished for this.

Regarding tables, take a look at the XML workflow developed by Open University, book bin: http://maclearning.o...e-pub-for-i-boo

Dr. Frank Lowney Georgia College & State University
Senior Director for External Projects
and Assistant to the Director, Digital Innovation Group @ Georgia College

#6 whitedog

Veteran

Group: Members
Posts: 3,697
Joined: 09-August 04

Posted 18 January 2012 - 03:56 PM

I second the wish for an iBooks app for the Mac. As it is many of us cannot read Macworld's current Superguides because they are no longer available in PDF format. Absent a Mac friendly iBooks app, the ability to export to PDF would be useful for more than just textbooks. Calibre will convert an ebook to PDF - sometimes. However, I've found it to be unreliable in that regard. It can be used to read ebooks, but it's clumsy to use there too. An iBooks app would be the best of all solutions, in my opinion, and would allow those of us without iPads into the iBook Store. In other words, Apple needs to provide a unified front end to create an ebook and a capable backend to read them. I'm sure they can manage both; whether they will choose to do so is another question. Apple has been releasing a lot of half-baked products lately, including FinalCut ProX and OS X Lion, and abandoning others, like iWeb.

This post has been edited by Chris Breen: 18 January 2012 - 03:58 PM

#7 mscrimger

Newbie

Group: Members
Posts: 6
Joined: 13-December 10

Posted 18 January 2012 - 04:34 PM

Do not all portable devices display PDF or Portable Document Format by adobe. It's that not an industry standard and why not use it for ebooks.

#8 AaronShep

Member

Group: Macworld Insiders
Posts: 103
Joined: 23-May 05

Posted 18 January 2012 - 05:16 PM

I'm figuring that this kind of thing is the reason we've had to wait so long for an update to Pages. That app's a natural for inclusion of advanced EPUB capabilities.

By the way, there's no real need anymore to export to MOBI, because Amazon's new publishing tools for Kindle Format 8 prefer EPUB as the input file.

Also by the way, you CAN get page breaks out of Pages, even now. There will be an automatic page break before any paragraph with a top-level style assigned to it (like Heading 1). You can even apply that to a paragraph with only a nonbreaking space, if you don't want it to alter the look of text.

#9 Serenity

Staff Editor

Group: Macworld Editorial
Posts: 202
Joined: 26-February 10

Posted 18 January 2012 - 05:43 PM

AaronShep, on 18 January 2012 - 05:16 PM, said:

Also by the way, you CAN get page breaks out of Pages, even now. There will be an automatic page break before any paragraph with a top-level style assigned to it (like Heading 1). You can even apply that to a paragraph with only a nonbreaking space, if you don't want it to alter the look of text.

Unfortunately, unless you tweak that in Sigil, you'll get weird blank TOC headers if you do that. But it's a good tip!

#10 Rdack

Newbie

Group: New Members
Posts: 1
Joined: 18-January 12

Posted 18 January 2012 - 06:29 PM

One issue I have with iBooks and could be a potential issue with textbooks is being able to copy for a quote. While one shouldn't be able to highlight a whole book and copy. One should be able to highlight a passage and have a quote copy feature for papers. Which would copy the passage along with a bibliographical reference.

Although, I don't write papers anymore, one would hope this software could be used for this as well. Perhaps allowing for standard submission to journals etc.

#11 DocNo

Veteran

Group: Macworld Insiders
Posts: 1,657
Joined: 24-June 05

Posted 18 January 2012 - 09:01 PM

For those more on the consumption side of things, take Calibre for a spin: http://calibre-ebook.com/

#12 ThadMcIlroy

Newbie

Group: New Members
Posts: 2
Joined: 19-January 12

Posted 19 January 2012 - 12:10 AM

This is an excellent overview of the state of ebook creation tools today. You skirted around the issue of ebook formats -- I don't blame you. But people sadly need to understand that a big part of the problem is that the current ebook formats, Mobi for Amazon and EPUB 2 for Apple and everyone else, are (a) not identical in capabilities and (

not identical from one e-reading program to another (for example Nook vs. Kobo). Worse is that these formats are far less graphically sophisticated than PDF, but PDF doesn't work because you can't reflow pages. Even worse is that Apple will be announcing support for the new EPUB3 format on Thursday, which is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than EPUB3, but even more divergent from the new Kindle KF8 format.

Your software wish list is excellent. I'm sure Apple will bring us at least a step closer later today.

#13 Serenity

Staff Editor

Group: Macworld Editorial
Posts: 202
Joined: 26-February 10

Posted 19 January 2012 - 12:18 AM

whitedog, on 18 January 2012 - 03:56 PM, said:

I second the wish for an iBooks app for the Mac. As it is many of us cannot read Macworld's current Superguides because they are no longer available in PDF format.

We actually still offer PDFs for most of our books--just as .ZIP bundles, so that you get more bang for your buck. (PDF, ePub, and MOBI versions.) You can't open them directly on an iOS device, but a computer should work just fine. For a full list of what we sell on PDF and CD, check out this website: https://store2.esell...PageCatalog.htm

#14 spinoza2

Member

Group: Members
Posts: 540
Joined: 24-January 08

Posted 19 January 2012 - 05:13 AM

It's really unbelievable that Apple has not yet developed a full development ecosystem for epublishing. When you think that they had a killer publishing app with iWeb, it would have been relatively easy to use it as a more expansive epublishing platform.

Apple is all about education, Apple has sung the praises of HTML5, Apple has effectively killed Flash, Apple had iWeb, Apple has iTunes, Apple has developed development packages for video and audio--what happened with epublishing? Why has it taken them sooo long to do the obvious with this?