The second coming of Hypercard: Apple introduces iBooks Author

At a press event at the Guggenheim Museum in NY, Apple yesterday introduced a new, free application for creating electronic books called iBooks Author, and while it has some notable limitations, it promises the kind of step-function increase in user empowerment not seen since the days of Hypercard. Seriously, it gave me flashbacks to 1987. And I don't say that lightly.

The iBooks Author software is essentially a page-oriented multimedia creation tool; that is, you can imagine PowerPoint on steroids, or for those familiar with high-end production, Quark or inDesign. But in addition to allowing you to easily create pages with rich media assets, it takes you to the next step, automatically packaging everything up in an electronic publication format distributable on the iPad.

In half an hour, I was able to build a basic e-book including pictures, interactive widgets, links, and alternate layouts for portrait and landscape. Another hour and I was up the curve enough on the developer back-end tool, Dashcode, to create a little custom HTML widget, integrate, and deploy the whole thing to an iPad.

This could give everyday users — like, say, Apple's stated target market of educators — the kind of tablet-publishing capability that will drive an explosion of diversity and experimentation.

Yes, to take full advantage of the interactivity, you need to use Apple's iBooks app on the iPad, although you can also output as an Adobe Acrobat PDF, readable across devices, which preserves some functionality. But that's clearly not its sweet spot.

For anyone who's tried to build e-pubs using existing tools, iBooks Author is a "glass of ice water in hell." Existing free or low-cost apps all aim at creating sturdy, validating, cross-platform epubs; the high-end extensions of tools like inDesign support rich media, but are expensive and often require proprietary deployment systems. Apple has lobbed an enormously powerful tool into this mix, and by giving it away, they are clearly aiming to amp development for the iPad. Vendor lock-in is always a Faustian bargain, but considering the terms of the license — if you give iBooks away for free, there's no cost; any sales must go through the Apple store where they take a reported 30% cut — many might find it reasonable.

Hypercard flashbacks. Big time. Anyone with a Mac now has a tool you can learn in an afternoon that can create a professional-level ebook. This is exactly the feeling we had in 1987 when Hypercard gave everyone the ability to build interactive screen-based applications point-and-click style. Do I miss the ability to control the entire UI? Do I wish there was a more fully-integrated scripting language like HyperTalk? Am I concerned about deploying on other platforms and open standards? Yeah, sure.

For those inclined to worry about Faustian bargains, just remember that publishing tools have unintended and unimaginable consequences. Once you give people access to the means of production, it's very hard to shove the genie back in the bottle. Hypercard may have died out as a platform, but the ripples of hypermedia read-write enablement are with us still. Will iBooks Author do the same for publishing? We shall see.

Full disclosure: Our family owns Apple stock.

Comments

An interesting point here -

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/20/apple_ibooks/

clearly a re-run of the "hook them in school" strategy with a side order of lock-in. Or maybe I'm just a grumpy old non iPad owner . . .

Hi, Chris...
Yeah, it's a clickwrap license, and it does require you to go through Apple's book store if you charge for the book produced with the software. Yes, this is a potentially onerous restriction, but OTOH, Apple is only controlling the end product produced with their free software. You don't want to roll the dice on them as a distribution channel, well, you can pony up a thousand bucks for Adobe inDesign (which, BTW, you do not then actually own — if you read their EULA, you only license their products. Just sayin... )

And, frankly, I would probably get more exercised about this if I hadn't just had the Worst. Panel. Ever. with Richard Stallman. Let me just say that I went into the panel a supporter of FOSS, and left ready to buy a new MacBookPro.

Cheers.
-j

Now now, just relax. There's nothing wrong with FOSS per se, only with some of it's crazier exponents.

I've found that Richard Stallman's arguments on the topic always boil down to: free software is great so long as everyone is just like Richard Stallman.

Hi, Len...
You're right, of course, and I don't intend to give up my sweet little Ubuntu netbook or the free software ethos. I believe in a world where communities build the tools they need and share them freely; I mean, this site runs on Drupal, and I write my posts with gedit and do all my graphics with GIMP. But, yes, there are times I use proprietary apps. When I needed to shoot and edit footage of Sen. Reed and Whitehouse at Clements, I did everything in iMovie on the iPad, because it enabled me to get information to my readers more quickly. I think of myself as trying to be balanced and thoughtful in my tool selection.

As the Tao Te Ching says, "Unbending rigor is the mate of death."

Cheers.
-j

but the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. "We'll give you a hammer, which is really nice of us, and let you build a house with it and we'll only take 30% of what you get for it. And the hammer is FREE! Unless, of course, we don't like the way the house looks, in which case we won't let you sell it at all, after all, it might reflect badly on our hammers if you built a funny looking house."

Although if I was a teacher in a school where there was a lot of iPod use, I'd be all over this like a skinny cat on a fat rat.

Sorry about the Stallman experience, though I know him only by reputation I understand he is not always the ideal ambassador for the ideas he espouses . . .

Chris

Hi, Chris...
Well put. This really has been the gripe about the App Store all along — you can use Apple's free Xcode tools, but you depend on them for distribution.

Since there are plenty of other e-pub tools out there, it really comes down to a decision by the individual content creator. I mean, it's just XHTML, you can build this stuff by hand. And if you do want to go through the iBooks store, you're still depending on Apple's approval no matter how you build it.

Personally, getting to keep 70% of list sounds like a pretty good deal, but I agree you need to go into this with your eyes open.

Cheers.
-j