Alan Quatermain

Alan Quatermain

The Tumblog of one Jim Dovey, iOS Software Chief Architect at Kobo in Toronto, Ontario.
He Twitters, he has an , and can occasionally be found on LinkedIn or Facebook.
If you have a query, you can ask it here.

This blog contains personal opinions, and is not endorsed by any company.

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iBooks Author vs. ePub Author

iBooks Author at the App Store

So, yesterday Apple launched the new iBooks Author application for the Mac. It looks great, produces fantastic dynamic content, and more than one person assumed that it was outputting ePub3 files. However, that was not the case, as is extensively documented by Daniel Glazman (co-chairman of the WC3 CSS working group) on his blog:

A wysiwyg EPUB3 editor will not be able to edit correctly an IBA document because of the different mimetype and the proprietary CSS extensions. iBooks Author is not able to reopen a iBook it exported in their pseudo-EPUB3 format because there is no Import mechanism! That means that on one hand EPUB3 readers cannot reuse a document created by iBooks Author because of its HTML/CSS/Namespaces extensions, and on the other iBooks Author cannot create an iBook from an existing EPUB3 document because it cannot import it.

In actuality, it even goes a little further than this.

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“Bottom-line: the EU thinks the “agency model” constitutes illegal price-fixing.”

John Gruber of Daring Fireball, commenting on this story from CNNMoney.

I’d say the possible reason for targeting Apple in this case is that Apple is also a platform vendor upon which competing eBook retailers wish to build platforms, and indeed have done so, before Apple. Apple’s accused collusion with publishers therefore additionally gives Apple a significant lever against competitors in the eReader app space. Just look at what they’ve done to Kindle, B&N, and Kobo.

Remember: if it weren’t for the Agency Model, all those would have been able to run decently enough via Apple IAP, albeit quite likely with higher prices. Apple eventually decided to allow us to charge more in our app— in the full knowledge that the deals they’d helped shepherd into the publishing industry would prevent us from actually doing so.
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Really, Apple? Really? This is definitely, honestly truthful? There’s really no way to read books on my iPad if I don’t have iBooks installed? REALLY???

Really, Apple? Really? This is definitely, honestly truthful? There’s really no way to read books on my iPad if I don’t have iBooks installed? REALLY???

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“[W]orking with the iBookstore has been the most amazingly horrible, opaque, and frustrating experience I’ve had. Apple’s software is terrible, the iTunes Connect Web site is lousy, and support questions often aren’t answered for - and I’m not kidding here - months. It’s gotten a little better over time, but mostly it makes my stomach hurt.”

Adam Engst, interviewed by eReaderJoy (courtesy of John Gruber).

Gee, it’s a good thing that there are other eBook store providers on iOS, eh?
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“All in all, the iPad won’t change the game as much as, say, Kobo, which is determined to become the world’s leading seller of e-books and plans to do so by allowing its e-books to be read on any device. It’s coming at this from the right direction. Apple dominates the digital-music world with the iPod and iPhone, but the iPad will not enjoy the same omniscience with digital books.”

How the iPad will deliver books from bondage - The Globe and Mail

Also nice is their use of the Kobo iPad app for their leading image :o)
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Marco.org: iBooks and private APIs

iBooks’ use of tons of private APIs is frustrating on a few levels, the biggest that it makes all third-party reading-related apps second-class citizens.

I won’t be able to offer many features that iBooks has (such as a true brightness control or integration with the system dictionary), but my…

Marco comes to much the same conclusion as I did with Pages. Of course, Pages really doesn’t call any external APIs, but it does make use of private system file formats which are usually only accessible through private APIs, so there’s not a lot of difference.