iPhone & iPad
Apple announced this week that they’ve followed Amazon’s lead and iBooks can now have audio and video embedded in them.
See my blog Do iPad or do I Kindle for more on this …
So with increased functionality in iBooks, I thought it worth pointing out the pros & cons of submitting your “work” as an iBook or as an App.
Why iBook?
If your content is essentially uni-directional – i.e. read, listen or watch only – then iBook is a good route. It is worth doing a Kindle version too though to get on both platforms at not much extra complexity or cost.
The production costs for a text only iBook are in the low hundreds of dollars and for a multimedia iBook (if you have the assets), certainly less than $1000. This means you will be able to get your investment back quickly for a reasonably popular title.
At the moment, authors and publisshers need a US Tax ID to submit self-published works – Storyist software is brilliant at generating compliant ePub files.
Note that various aggregator sites, like Smashwords and Lulu, allow international self-published authors to submit to the iBookstore. They will have to catch up a little to support the new format though.
Why App?
An app is a completely different kettle of bananas. When you build an app, you can access all the features of the iPhone, iPod tocuh and iPad operating system.
Apps are interactive and bi-directional. In my opinion, they should be used to either augment a conventional or ebook OR to extend the idea of what a book is about in the first place.
For example, see these App Books and note their main features:
140 Characters – embedded discussion forum for author and readers to interact
Kryo Pro – card set and book integrated with auto-switch between four languages – English, Russian, German and Spanish PLUS ability to email or Tweet a sample
The Elements: A Visual Exploration – incredible multimedia experience with 3-D rotating graphics
Top 10 City Guides – geo-coded information, latest news vis RSS feeds
Now before you get excited, your investment in an app like these starts at a few thousand dollars. Get it right though and you have access to tens of millions of owners of a device.
Even if you give your app away, the exposure alone can be worth it.
Note also that the other advantage of an App over an iBook is the seperate listing on the iTunes store on the web, as opposed to within the iBookstore which is only accessed via the device at the moment.
This is perhaps not of great significance but you do have your own App URL and it seems to get great Google rankings too.
Note also that as Apple and others allow more features of HTML5 to be introduced, this gap will narrow even more … watch this space …
