The iPad -- now, with marketing!

Michael Jensen | 03/12/2010

Now that Apple is launching promotional marketing for the iPad, not merely getting the hundreds of millions of dollars of free advertising generated by its well-honed media hype system, I’m changing my tune a bit—on the iPad specifically, and on the iPad within the tablet arena.

Apple’s 25-second ad, first shown during the Oscar broadcast (http://www.apple.com/ipad/gallery/#hardware06) made me want the iPad in a way that Steve Jobs, and the breathless reportage of the much-vaunted announcement, simply didn’t. The ad is fabulous propaganda, which Apple does better than anyone.

The other tablet manufacturers, interface providers, and business-model participants will have some real difficulty competing with an integrated device such as the iPad, but even more, will have trouble competing on desirability. What the ad communicated was the seeming consistency, as well as the breadth, of its information-engagement touchscreen interface.

Another tablet may have a quality Web browsing experience, but won’t have the iBookstore; another tablet may have a great touchscreen experience, but won’t have the ability to have an App store; another tablet may have Google Book Search built-in, but won’t have Mac-like email and scheduling.

The integrated package means that we, as publishers, will need to take the iPad and iBookstore very seriously (as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others will or should).

I suspect, as Apple rolls out its iPad in the States and in Canada (in April, they promise), that the iBookstore market, by Q4 2010, will be a growing, vibrant one. If the iPhone is any indication, iPad owners will be comparing the books they have on their iBookshelf, and buying books from the iBookstore just to have them.

Please note: Apple’s iBookstore will only accept ebooks in .epub format, not PDF—so now is a good time to be initiating your .epub experiments.

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Hands-on with .epub

Michael Jensen | 02/24/2010

I recently constructed an .epub eBook using free tools, to see how it would work—how easy it might be, how attractive I might make it, how the more-complicated typographic elements of the Web (right-align callouts, tables, divs) might be represented in the .epub ebook format.

InDesign, and a few other professional typesetting/formatting systems can produce simple ebooks fairly easily, but I wanted to understand a bit more deeply what it entailed, hands-on.

The first time doing anything is the hardest, of course, and while I’d overseen the production of ebooks, I’d not gotten in with nuts, code, and bits for years. I tried out a number of awkward free systems, and built my own files from scratch.

So far, the best tool right now for experimenting with ebooks is probably Calibre—an opensource and free ebook management (but not editing) system.

Calibre reads many file formats, and can also export many formats—which means you can take a well-formed HTML file, read it into the system, add metadata to it, view it within the (forgiving) Calibre reading software, and then save as an .epub format file, one functionally ready for pulling into an ebook reader.

I say “functionally” because ebook-reading software (not the format itself) is at a similar stage of development to what browsers were back in 2000—when Netscape displayed the same Web page differently from Internet Explorer, or other internet browsers.

Today, the same file that renders well in Calibre or Adobe Editions may not render well in a Sony Reader, or on an iPod with Stanza. Text-wraps around pictures, for example, don’t translate, nor do most typographic niceties. I tried a variety of experiments to test the boundaries.

With the .epub I was producing, I ended up having to rethink how to represent the pictures-and-captions that littered the text, even to the extent of moving their placement, in order to achieve a sort of lowest-common-denominator, very-simple linear presentation—a poor cousin to the print experience.

That will evolve, of course—ebook reader software will improve, and become more consistent across devices—but for now, as you experiment with digital export, choose a few straightforward texts, get someone on staff to experiment with Calibre, and then try reading it into whatever ebook reader and software that you have available.

Lowest common denominator simplifying may not be optimal, but at least you won’t have grumpy customers.

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On iPads and Tablets

Michael Jensen | 02/23/2010

The US is all a-buzz about Apple’s iPads, and about What It All Means.

What it all means is both small and huge.

On the one hand, tablets may become the perfect reading device—with processor smarts, page-turning grace, color, multimedia capabilities, likely (eventual) 3-D display capabilities, and an Amazon-Killer App with a business model, the iBookstore or other ebook stores, thrown in.

Yet that’s the small meaning.

The larger meaning has to do with a transformation of technology into consumer commodity. Steve Jobs didn’t talk about the gigahertz, about pixels, about storage. He didn’t announce a new operating system, or the implementation of Apple’s new chip, or the SDK or the API.

Instead, it was about coolness, and sexiness, and a lush reading experience.

Of course it also means that Apple is trying to define the landscape of the next few years, and that they’re asserting that their vision of computing is the right one. Whether it works or not will be seen around Christmas, 2010… but regardless, what Apple has done is frame the discussion, and massively raised the profile, of digital publishing, simply by bringing out a cool, sexy bit of proprietary hardware that is not about the hardware, but about the experience.

This first iPad version is a placeholder—the even better versions will be released rapidly, by Apple and others, with cameras, multitasking, phone, and 3-D videoconferencing, over the next year or two.

But Apple has made the digital-product experience luscious, and attractive—which is likely to be good for most quality publishing.

Watching to see the uptake of this mode of invisible, nongeeky computing, and the iBookstore in particular, may indicate how rapidly we need to ramp up our ebook offerings for export to the world market.

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