Digital Publishing

Apple iText Books

There is a lot of excited and analytic commentary floating around about  the Apple iBook Author thing.

My friend and argument partner Mark from Axis 12 in London said we should have a press release:  "When asked if he thought the recent release of ibook author threatened the viability of his flagship product, Mr Pipe, CEO of Infogrid Pacific and the company behind IGP:Digital Publisher replied, "It's very pretty."

After digesting the crazy license and serious limitations for any type of education content and the serious blog statements about IP, I am reasonably sure it is going to be highly successful in the Apple controlled content ecosystem. It's difficult to beat frenzy, greed and myopia!

AZARDI 8.1 Released

An update has been released for AZARDI. This is a small feature upgrade and bugfix release. The full version is available from the AZARDI site. If you have AZARDI 7 or 8 installed this will update automatically next time you open the reader.

We have also included a 64bit deb package version for Linux in this release.

The new features are:

ePub 2, ePub 3+2, ePub 3 Test Books

We have posted some ePub samples on the AZARDI resource page to enable publishers to possibly understand and evaluate the various transition issues when making decisions about when to move to ePub 3, and how.

The samples include four Gutenberg books processed as ePub2, ePub3+2 (transitional) and ePub3 directly out of IGP:Digital Publisher. I could have added a KF8 mobi as well but that would have been showing off, and AZARDI doesn't like them.

The most interesting issue with these ePub variants is how they work on various readers - the reason for this evaluation set. It helps to set a baseline of understanding the issues.

Cover treatment is probably the biggest issue, but ePub 3  also has a cute little landmarks section that will only be seen in AZARDI right now.