Category Archives: Tools

As An Author, Why I Truly Hate Ebook DRM

As an author of multiple technical books, and a prolific online writer, I care a lot about intellectual property issues as they pertain to my content. On one level, you might think I would be extremely concerned about people stealing and re-using my content. And don’t get me wrong… I am concerned. I choose distribution licenses carefully and I have pursued those who have scraped my content to simply wrap it in ads.

But I do NOT see “DRM” as the answer.

As a reader and as an author, I truly hate Digital Rights Management (DRM) for ebooks and look forward to the day when it ceases to exist. My latest book, “Migrating Applications to IPv6” was published DRM-FREE by O’Reilly and I plan to publish all future books DRM-free as well.

So on this “Day Against DRM“, let me clearly state WHY as an author I am against DRM:

1. DRM Is Anti-Reader

DRM starts from the premise that all readers are slimeballs and thieves. That they will steal a book rather than pay for it. That readers are inherently untrustworthy and need to be monitored, policed, checked.

Is that really the relationship I want with my readers?

Do I really think that all my readers are crooks?

With a printed book, as a reader, when I buy a book, it is mine. I have a piece of dead trees that I can read wherever I want. In a chair. In bed. Outside under a tree. In the bathroom. On a train. In a hammock. In a car. At night. In the morning.

Wherever. Whenever.

Beyond that, I can give my book to someone else. I can lend it to a friend. I can let my wife read it. Or my daughter. Or my mother or father. I can… (gasp)… sell that book to someone. Or I can donate it to a library or church or book sale.

It is my book, to do with it as I will.

With “ebooks”, the argument is that they are so much easier to pass around. That because it is electronic bits, the book can be emailed or otherwise sent to people. It can be published on websites. It can be sold by people other than the author/publisher. It can “escape” from the control of the author and publisher.

All of which is true.

But is DRM really the answer? Is treating all people as thieves and locking down the content really the answer?

Now, granted, there is a grain of truth in there… some readers will steal a book, but would they have paid for it in the first place? Some people will steal paper books from bookstores and libraries, too! Some people will steal books from other people.

Some people are thieves – but just because of that, does it warrant treating all people as thieves?

2. DRM Locks Readers In To Platforms

Every time you buy a book for the Amazon Kindle, you are just that much more locked in to Amazon’s “walled garden”. If you decide you are tired of the Kindle and want to try another reader, sorry…

… you can’t take your books with you!

They are locked to the Kindle. Now, yes, you can use the Kindle “app” on your PC or other device (like an iPad), but you are still locked in to Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem.

This is the beauty and genius of the whole scheme from Amazon’s point of view. Make it super-simple for people to buy and read ebooks… and get a whole generation of people locked in to your ereader platform.

And then Amazon gets to use its power as platform to bully publishers and authors so that in the end Amazon gets higher profits. If pretty much the only route to readers winds up being through the Kindle ecosystem, then Amazon gets to dictate how your ebooks get distributed – and at what cost.

Authors get screwed. Publishers get screwed. Ultimately readers get screwed. But Amazon makes a healthy profit.

Lest you think I am purely anti-Amazon, I’m not… they’re just the biggest. Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iBookstore, the Kobo reader… any of them can equally lock you in with DRM… and all of them would probably love to have the kind of lock-in that Amazon has right now!

With DRM-free ebooks, we can read them on whatever platform you want – and change ereaders and devices. We are not locked in!

[UPDATE: In a comment to this post, a reader named Markus points out another downside to DRM-enabled ebook platforms – a platform can easily “unpublish” an ebook. The ebook can just “disappear” and be removed both from the online service and also from your own ereader. Remotely. Without any involvement on your part. Gone. Because you are locked into the platform’s infrastructure and don’t own your ebook, you are completely at the mercy of the platform operator.]

3. DRM Adds Unneeded Complexity

Want to see how badly DRM screws up the reader experience? Check out these instructions for how to get started with ebooks that you borrow from your library – specifically take a look at these slides about how to borrow ebooks with a Nook or Sony Reader.

Hello???

You have to be seriously committed to wanting to borrow ebooks to go through all these steps! It’s crazy! And then to have to go through many of those steps each and every time you want to borrow an ebook?

FAIL

And all because libraries must include DRM in order to make the books available to their readers.

This kind of complexity exists with DRM ebooks… except of course for the platforms that make it so insanely easy, at the price of locking you in.

4. DRM Stifles Innovation

We have “ereader” devices and software… we have “epublishing” tools… but we could always use better and more innovative tools. Right now there is undoubtedly someone out there building an insanely awesome reader that will just blow our minds. Or figuring out a way to make ebooks more accessible to people who can’t read… maybe converting them to audio in new ways. Or figuring out a way to translate books into other languages on the fly….

Maybe someone’s coming up with a reader that will let you display the contents of an ebook inside a pair of glasses so that you could just be sitting there on a train reading a book with just your glasses on.

The inventors and entrepreneurs of the world can be out there doing all this… but then the moment they want to make these products publicly available and working with all ebooks… BOOM… they run into the issue that they have to deal with DRM on ebooks!

That means licensing someone’s DRM-reading software.

Which means big bucks…

… and probably kills any type of business model they may have.

Goodbye insanely amazing reader… it will linger on the side as something that can work with DRM-free content like Project Gutenberg books, O’Reilly books… and those from a few other publishers who have gone DRM-free.

Why stifle the innovation?

Why not make it so that the inventors out there can do anything with ebooks? Why not get rid of the DRM so that they can figure out new and amazing things to do with ebooks?

STOP RESTRICTING CREATIVITY!

5. DRM Will Ultimately Impact Sales

People are buying zillions of ebooks right now. More from some publishers than print books. It’s a new space… everyone’s excited… everyone’s doing it. It’s incredibly convenient.

Sooner or later, though, readers are going to figure out that they are getting royally screwed.

They will figure out that they don’t “own” their DRM’d books. That they have effectively leased them. That they can’t use them on other computers or ereaders.

They will be pissed off, angry.

And they may stop buying… or at least changing their buying habits.

Why set readers up for failure? Why?

Why not make it so that they can keep buying and buying and buying?

I know that I personally would buy far more ebooks if I knew I could “own” the ebook. I believe that ultimately more people will be in this mindset.

(DRM proponents, of course, believe that all people are sheep and will just continue to buy through locked-down DRM’d platforms because of the convenience. Sadly, they may be right.)

6. DRM Halts The Spread Of Ideas

Finally, DRM stops the spread of ideas and information. With DRM-free books, they can spread to people who would not have – or could not have – paid for the book in the first place. There are people in impoverished areas who cannot afford ebooks. There are people in countries where ebooks are not available through the major distribution channels. [UPDATE: There are people who would like to borrow an ebook from their library but are unable to do so in some cases because DRM makes it difficult.]

This is admittedly where it gets a bit tricky.

In my case, the kinds of books I have written so far are informational and for more niche technical audiences. I don’t expect to ever get rich from them. I don’t expect to pay my mortgage, send my kids to college, or anything like that. I might get a few nice dinners out of the proceeds or maybe buy a new computer… but that’s about it. I’m realistic because there are only so many people out there who really care about things like IPv6 or VoIP security.

I write to help people understand topics. I write to contribute to the discussions going on. I write to help people learn.

So if someone really couldn’t afford to buy my ebooks, can’t get them in their region because of distribution issues, or can’t borrow my ebook from their library, I’m personally okay if they wind up getting the book somehow. For me getting the ideas out there is most important.

I realize that some authors (and more importantly publishers) may be entirely profit-focused and want to squeeze every single penny out that they can… and so they have a different view.

The point, though, is that DRM prohibits these ideas from spreading where they wouldn’t have gone.

In the end…

I guess I go back to my comments at the beginning – I believe that most people are NOT thieves… and if they have the opportunity to purchase an ebook in the channel of their choice for the ereader of their choice at a reasonable cost, they will do so.

I believe DRM is not the answer and that there are other ways and means to pursue those who violate intellectual property rights and copyrights. I don’t want a world in which we are locked into specific ereader platforms.

I want readers to be able to purchase – and own – my books. And as a reader, I want that kind of trust relationship with authors and publishers.

So on this day, I encourage you to think about how DRM creates a defective and negative experience for readers… and to:

Buy DRM-free ebooks where you can. (Update: Here’s a list.)
Ask publishers and authors if you can get their ebooks DRM-free.
Think seriously about the choice of ereader you are using and what the long-term impacts will be.
If you are an author, ask your publisher if you can make your ebooks DRM-free… or consider another publisher… or consider self-publishing without DRM.
Raise this topic with others, so that they can be aware of the choices they are making when they use ereaders and purchase ebooks.

The future of ebooks is in OUR hands, as readers, authors and publishers. Let’s make it a good one!

UPDATE #1: In the comment thread on Hacker News for this post, user spatten pointed out this list of dealers and publishers with DRM-free ebooks. (By the way, that Hacker News comment thread does make for interesting reading.)

UPDATE #2: Two other excellent posts on the topic have come out yesterday and today:

Cory Doctorow at The Guardian: Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers
Mike Hendrickson at O’Reilly Radar: DRM-Free Day, forever. –
Authors and publishers need to get creative with piracy. DRM isn’t the answer.

I particularly liked this line of Mike’s post: “Obscurity is more of an enemy than piracy.” Tim O’Reilly expanded on this point way back in 2006.

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WordPress Dominates Top 100 Blog/Media Sites

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If you had any doubt about the outcome of the "platform wars" of the past few years for "blog"-type sites, one graphic can remove that doubt:

Wordpress top100blogs 201204

This comes from a just-released study from Pingdom and before you say "well, of course, this is all about blogs, so naturally WordPress would dominate"… please do scroll down the article and see the range of sites that Pingdom's study covers (the ones that are italicized use WordPress):

Huffington Post
Mashable
TechCrunch
Engadget
Gizmodo
Ars Technica
The Next Web
GigaOm
CNN Political Ticker
ReadWriteWeb

… and many more… the point is that what is classified as a "blog" for this study includes many of the "media" sites that many of us visit frequently – and many of those "media" sites turn out to be using WordPress.

The Pingdom article has many other great pieces of information, including this chart comparing the platforms of the Technorati Top 100 blogs in 2009 versus 2012:

Blog platforms

The outright (and not surprising) decline of some platforms like TypePad (on which this DisruptiveConversations site is still hosted) is very clear for all to see as well as the strong rise in WordPress usage.

The ecosystem around WordPress continues to expand at a phenomenal rate and studies like this are useful to measure that actual growth. What would be interesting to see, too, would be a study of "websites" in general, i.e. not just "blogs" but perhaps the Alexa Top 100 or some other set, to see what % of sites there use WordPress and these other platforms. As noted in the Pingdom article, the WordPress team has spent a great amount of time working on making the system more useful as a more generic content management system (CMS) and so the type of sites that are now using WordPress is expanding far beyond its roots in blogging. It will be interesting to see how that changes the web hosting dynamics over the next few years.

Thanks to Pingdom for undertaking the work – and I look forward to seeing what the field looks like in another three years!

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My Report into For Immediate Release (FIR) Podcast #646

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In this week's For Immediate Release episode #646, my report covered:

Privacy and Facebook applications: the Wall Street Journal article and the TechCrunch response that fears are overhyped
Hotels can potentially add content (like ads) to your web pages on their WiFi networks
Google's Project Glass explores another way to look at the world
A brief comment on the Pew Internet report on the rise of e-reading (subsequently covered in greater detail by Shel and Neville).

If you are a FIR subscriber, you should have the show now in iTunes or whatever you use to get the feed. If you aren't a subscriber, you can simply listen to the episode online now.

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How To Auto-Update WordPress Custom Themes Using Github

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Have you wished that you could get an automatic update notification in WordPress for a custom theme that you have used? You know, like the "update automatically" notifications for "official" themes hosted on WordPress.org such as this one?

Themeautoupdate

Or perhaps you have created a custom theme and you would like to have a way for the users of your theme to receive notifications and updates whenever you update the theme? You can then fix up your theme, post a new version and… ta da… all your clients get the notification and can "update automatically" to the latest version?

UPDATE – 6 Apr 2015: The UCF "Theme Updater" plugin originally referenced in this article is no longer being maintained. I would suggest using Andy Fragen's GitHub Updater plugin instead. It uses the same syntax as the original UCF plugin.

If you've been looking to do this… and aren't afraid of (or enjoy!) working with the git version control system and Github, there's a very cool way to do all this that gives a very similar user experience:

Theme github

In fact, it winds up being a bit better than the normal WordPress theme auto-update process because after you do the update, you actually have the ability to roll back to previous versions of the custom theme if the new one causes problems:

Theme github rollback

This is something you can't do easily with the normal WordPress theme update process.

Initial Setup / Configuration

If you want to set this up for your own themes, here's the process…

1. Publish Your Theme To A Github Repository

You need an account (which is free) on Github, and you need to create a repository (a.k.a. a "repo") there for your theme. If you've never used git before, Github has some great help pages that explain the process. If you use a Mac, there is also a great Github for Mac app that makes the process super simple of updating your git repo locally and pushing the changes to Github.

The end result is that you need to have a git repo on your local computer that has your theme and that repo is synced up to a corresponding repo on Github.

I'll note that this process only works with public Github repositories, so your code does have to be open to the public. If you want to keep your code private so that only you and your clients see it, this process won't work for you. (Although see the notes at the bottom of the post.)

2. Modify Your Theme To Include a Github URI

The next step is to go into your style.css file in your theme and add one critical line containing a "Github Theme URI":

Theme Name: Example  
Theme URI: http://example.com/  
Github Theme URI: https://github.com/username/repo-name
Description: My Example Theme
Author: person
Version: v1.0.0

You can see an example in a demo theme I have. The URL you use is that of your repository up on Github. That's it.

Now you need to commit this change to your local repo and push the change up to Github.

3. Create a Tag in Your Repository

In your local repo, you need to "tag" the repo with a version number. THAT VERSION NUMBER NEEDS TO MATCH WHAT YOU HAVE IN STYLE.CSS for everything to work right. You then need to push this tag up to Github. Here are the command-line commands you need:

$ git tag v1.0.0
$ git push origin v1.0.0

Obviously with whatever version number you use.

4. Upload Your Theme To Your WordPress Site

Now your theme is all ready to be uploaded to your WordPress site. There are a couple of different ways you can do this, but one simple way is:

Create a ZIP file of your theme on your local computer.

Inside your WordPress admin menu (standalone) or network admin menu (MultiSite) go to the Install Themes panel and click on "Upload".

Choose your ZIP file and press "Install Now".

You'll now have the theme installed in your WordPress site. You can now activate it and use the theme for your site.

5. Install the Theme GitHub Updater Plugin

UPDATE – 6 Apr 2015: Andy Fragen's GitHub Updater plugin can be installed using one of the different methods described under the "Installation" section of his "README" document. I have found the simplest is to download the plugin zip file from his site and upload it manually to my WordPress site.

Unfortunately, you cannot simply add this GitHub Updater plugin directly from the standard WordPress.org plugin directory. The plugin, as well as others such as the original UCF Theme Updater plugin, were removed from the main WordPress.org plugin repository as the operators of that repository felt it was not appropriate to include those plugins as they could be used to pull in code that was malicious or was otherwise not reviewed by the WP.org team. You therefore have to use one of the other installation methods described.

Here's the part that makes the "update notifications" piece all work nicely. Some guys down at the University of Central Florida came up with this very cool plugin for WordPress called "Theme Updater" that is available here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/theme-updater/

You can either download it from that site or, much more simply, just go into the Plugins menu of WordPress, choose "Add New" and search for "Theme Updater".

(NOTE: The plugin does work with WordPress 3.3.1, so you can ignore the warning message about the plugin not being tested with your version. The meta-data for WordPress.org simply didn't get updated when the new version was recently posted. Given that I was doing some of the last testing, I can tell you that I did the testing on WordPress 3.3.1 on both a standalone and a MultiSite installation.)

Once you have installed the plugin, you simply activate it – or in WordPress MultiSite do a "Network Activate".

That's it. There is no configuration panel. No options. It just sits in the background and checks for updates of the Github-hosted theme.

That's all that is involved with the setup. Your installed theme is ready to be automatically updated. So, now you want to do the update…

Updating The Theme

When you have updates, the process is pretty straightforward.

1. Make And Commit Your Theme Updates

Edit your theme, make whatever changes, modifications, additions you need.

Commit your changes to your local git repo and push those changes to Github.

2. Update The Version Number in Style.css

In your style.css file, increment your version number, as in this example:

Theme Name: Example  
Theme URI: http://example.com/  
Github Theme URI: https://github.com/username/repo-name
Description: My Example Theme
Author: person
Version: v1.1.0

Commit the change locally and push the change to Github. (And yes, this could have simply been done as part of step #1.

3. Create a new tag and push the tag

Create a tag in git that matches the version number in step #2 and push that tag up to Github:

$ git tag v1.1.0
$ git push origin v1.1.0

That's it!

Now users of your custom theme will get a notification along the lines of this in WordPress MultiSite:

Theme github

or this in the "regular" standalone mode of WordPress:

Themeupdate standalone

and can simply "update automatically" to get the new version of the theme.

Other Notes

The "Theme Updater" plugin for WordPress is naturally hosted on Github:

https://github.com/UCF/Theme-Updater

You can see the source code there, download the latest, etc. If you are a Github user, you can "watch" the repo, fork it, clone it, etc.

If you find an issue with the plugin or have a feature request or suggestion, you can raise an issue (assuming you are logged in to your own Github account) in the Issues area.

I don't know but I get the sense that the UCF team made this plugin for their own usage and don't necessarily have grand plans for future versions (i.e. it works fine for them now). But if you want to add functionality yourself, like, oh, for instance adding in the ability to connect to private Github repos, you can certainly use the standard Github process of forking the repo, adding in code and then issuing a pull request to get your changes merged in. (And if that last sentence made absolutely no sense to you, don't worry about it and just have a nice day! 😉

All in all I've found this to be a great process to let me publish a custom theme publicly and then auto-update multiple sites off of that custom theme. Kudos to the UCF team for creating this plugin and making it available!

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O’Reilly Offers Free Ebook: “Publishing with iBooks Author”

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In an interesting move, O’Reilly Media has made their brand new ebook, “Publishing with iBooks Author“, available for free download (assuming you have a free account set up with O’Reilly). As is standard with O’Reilly now, the ebook is DRM-free and available as EPUB, Mobi (Kindle) or PDF.

Now, I personally have serious issues with iBooks Author with regard to its deviation from the EPUB standard and the legal lock-in that restricts sales to Apple’s iBookstore. It also annoys me that books created with the tool will only work on the iPad, even while I understand Apple’s strategy.

Having said all that, I’ve played with iBooks Author and it is a great tool for creating ebooks. Apple has raised the bar on ease-of-use for ebook creation tools and that is definitely a good thing. As my attendance at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference last week in New York certainly showed to me, we need tools that are easier-to-use for even more people to be able to create ebooks.

My sincere hope is that creators of other ebook authoring tools will take a serious look at what Apple has done with iBooks Author and figure out how to deliver a similar (or better) user experience where the final output can also work on other ebook platforms. The tool vendor who can do that will certainly receive a lot of interest judging from the conversations I’ve had with people both at TOCCON last week and also in numerous other venues.

So to that end, I commend O’Reilly on releasing this new ebook for free and I do hope people will download it and understand just what Apple has done to make ebook creation so easy… and then use that knowledge to build even better tools!

P.S. In full disclosure, O’Reilly is the publisher of my most recent ebook, but that has nothing to do with why I am writing about them here. (And it was written entirely in DocBook XML, because that’s just the kind of author I am… )

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Attending O’Reilly’s Tools of Change Conference (TOCCON) This Week in New York

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This week I will be in New York City at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, a.k.a. “TOC” or “TOCCON”. As I wrote about recently on the Deploy360 blog, TOC is really the premiere gathering of the people behind the technology behind digital and online publishing. While there certainly are people there from the “traditional” publishing industry, the event really brings together all of those who are disrupting publishing as we know it.

For my part, I am going to primarily to do a deep-dive into the technology and tools behind ebook publishing. While some of my own books are offered as ebooks, the publishers have been the ones doing the actual ebook creation. I certainly understand the basics, but want to really dig deeper. I have a strong interest in seeing what we can do within the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme to take some of the long-form content we or our partners have and make that available in an ebook form. Partly I want people to be able to take the content and have it very easily accessible in an offline form. Partly I want to offer people the ability to consume our content using an ebook reader. And partly I want to experiment with marketing our content through some of the various ebook stores. LOTS of ideas… now, whether I will be able to carve out the time to implement those ideas is a different question. 🙂

Anyway, if you are going to be down at TOCCON this week, please do say hello or drop me a msg via email or Twitter.

P.S. TOCCON will be an interesting event for me as I am not speaking, as I often do, nor am I staffing a booth, live tweeting, reporting or anything else. I am just there to learn, meet people and explore new ideas. I’m actually looking forward to the change of pace, bizarre as it will be for me. 🙂

The Challenge of Apple Forking the EPUB Standard with iBooks Author – 4 Articles to Read

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IBooksAuthor While I ranted last week (here and here) about the lock-in aspect of Apple’s launch of iBooks Author, an even more disturbing action Apple took was to “embrace and extend” the EPUB standard and create their own version. In programming-speak, they “forked” the standard and are now off with their own proprietary – and incompatible – version.

What this means is that I was wrong in my last post – there is in fact a technical restriction on how you can view ebooks created with the new iBooks Author app.

Basically, you can only view them on the iPad using iBooks.

That’s it.

Complete lock-in, both legally and technically.

Here are four posts that go into great detail about the new format and explain how Apple deviated from the EPUB standard:

Baldur Bjarnason: (whose blog design I very much like)
Daniel Glazman: (Co-chair of the W3C CSS Working Group)
- iBooks Author, a nice tool but..

I share the frustration of both authors and have to end quoting Baldur Bjarnason’s last post in his series:

The idea behind ePub3 is that it would, finally, bring ebooks to a relative feature parity with the web and enable more advanced authoring and reading tools. The iBooks Author application is exactly the sort of app people expected would be brought to market as a result of ePub3’s capabilities. The iBooks new textbooks are exactly the sort of dynamic, interactive, and rich ebooks that ePub3 enables.

Now that Apple has decided to deliver both as a part of a custom format that throws the future of ePub3 into question. Apple isn’t an outsider who decided that a format somebody else didn’t have the capabilities it needed, it is essentially one of the format’s co-authors. One of the format’s biggest proponents and supporters has forked ePub3.

This is akin to Google deciding to build support for an incompatible fork of the HTML5 standard in Chrome after it had gone through the trouble of building consensus around the standard.

Will Apple add ePub3 to iBooks now? If they do, will they do a full-featured implementation that matches the capabilities of the textbook format, or will they just work like a warmed over ePub2 files?

What was the point of Apple’s participation in the ePub3 standards process?

No. I have to say, I still don’t understand why they did it.

Again, iBooks Author just makes me sad…

P.S. Hat tip to Rich Ruh for pointing me to one of these articles, which then led to others.

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Yes, Apple’s iBooks Author Strategy Is Absolutely Brilliant… Just Short-Sighted

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IBooksAuthor After my rant yesterday about Apple’s über-restrictive license terms for the new iBooks Author app, I had several comments to the effect of “DUH!” and “Well, doesn’t it make sense for Apple?”

Yes, it absolutely makes sense for Apple.

It’s the proverbial “give away the razors to sell more blades”.

Or give out free samples of crack to turn people into addicts.

Give people a FREE, simple, easy-to-use authoring program – AND give them an easy channel to market with iBookstore…

…with just that wee minor stipulation that Apple gets 30% of all sales and locks you in to their marketplace and their rules (including whether or not your book even gets published).

Brilliant.

Abso-freaking-lutely brilliant!

And I have no doubt it will be insanely successful. With this one action Apple will sow the seeds for thousands… probably tens of thousands and maybe even millions of ebooks to be born. Textbooks, sure, but many other kinds of books. Having used iBooks Author a bit yesterday I can say that it really does seem to be a great editor.

And I get that it is called “iBooks Author” and not something like “eBook Author” because it is designed as an on-ramp to get content into iBookstore. Apple’s not even pretending it’s for anything else…

And I completely understand that, just like the App Store, Apple’s requirement to be the gatekeeper to what gets published is in part wanting to control what gets published, but also wanting to ensure that the iBookstore user experience “just works” and that books have a certainly level of quality and lack of technical errors.

And I get that it is free and so comes with these restrictions – although I, for one, would gladly pay for a version that was not locked to a specific marketplace.

And on a macro level, there is a part of me that welcomes anything that brings more competition to the larger publishing marketplace. I’m a big fan of Amazon, make many purchases through Amazon and see a good bit of sales of my books coming through Amazon… but I share the concern of many that Amazon is perhaps too powerful and able to exert too much of an influence in the publishing space. So on a macro level I’m okay with Apple building up their iBookstore to be a stronger competitor. Competition is good, both for consumers and for authors.

But…

… as I said in my other post, iBooks Author could have been so much more.

Edd Dumbill really nailed it in a Google+ post appropriately titled “iBooks Author makes me sad” when he begins:

I adore content creation tools. I’ve spent most of my adult life either trying to build content creation tools or in the search for the perfect one. How exciting that Apple are getting behind this!

and ends with:

Write a book, any book, as long as it conforms and you permit us to own your distribution. Oh, except if you’re giving it away. In that case, have at it, we love free advertising!

No thanks.

Like Edd, iBooks Author makes me sad.

Particularly when there is probably no technical reason to restrict published books to iBookstore. Early reports I’ve seen indicate that iBooks Author spits out a modified version of the EPUB 3 format. Apple’s just doing a little bit of the old “embrace and extend” of open standards.

Give some developers a few hours and someone will have a script out there to make an iBook Author-published book readable in other readers. That script is probably already out there if I search hard enough.

No technical restriction… just a legal restriction.

Like Edd, I adore content creation tools. For the past 25+ years, I’ve been working with such tools and always searching for better tools that help us as content creators more rapidly create even better content.

There is a need for simple, easy-to-use tools for ebook creation that can help take advantage of the differences of an ebook from a regular book.

Many of the tools out there today are designed to help you take written text and package it up in the appropriate formats for ebooks. While this is great, it doesn’t make use of what is different about ebooks. The idea that you could easily incorporate multimedia content… or even bring in live content from the Web. The idea of making an ebook that might appear different on different devices. Or that could be displayed differently for different people (ex. font sizes or typefaces).

iBooks Author could be the “killer app” that totally disrupts publishing and lets so many more people easily publish ebooks.

I don’t know if it is, because I’ve just started playing with it.

But even if it is, what makes me sad is that it is tied to one closed, locked-in ecosystem.

Perhaps it will open up at some point (although I doubt it)… and perhaps it will inspire other app vendors to make a similar app that is just as good or even better, or to improve existing apps.

Yes, the strategy is brilliant and yes, Apple will probably make millions as a result of this.

And I’m honestly glad that Apple released iBooks Author. It’s great to see their support behind ebook publishing and it’s great to have their entrant into the tools space.

But where the app could have lifted the entire ebook publishing space and maybe even become THE default ebook publishing app (at least on the Mac)… now it may only lift one part of the ebook publishing space.

That is what I find sad.

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