Jobs illustrates just how "complex" a program should be. Apple wins, thinking like that.
See Roughly Drafted: iDVD hung out to dry as Apple pushes movies online
-- originally published on Flickr January 30, 2009
I repeat this because people seeing the Editis post are probably scoffing at how "difficult" it would be to create Intelligent eBooks such as those.
Yet look at how Apple managed to bring movie creation and DVD authoring to the masses:
It's all been made drag-and-drop simple.
But what does this have to do with eBooks? It's what I've mentioned before: Pages.
Hop to 3:22 in this video to see a demo of Pages:
If you've watched that, and you're a writer who has struggled with HTML, XML, ePub or any other eBook format, you must be drooling at the mouth over the utter simplicity and obviousness of that approach.
No coding, no dicking around with screwy CSS, no "Let me try this and then go into Preview Mode to see if that works" nonsense.
As the opening quote stated, people drag and drop their stuff and hit Burn.
Apple could easily extend Pages so after everything has been assembled, the final button to hit is Make eBook.
I don't know a single writer -- including Moriah Jovan -- who would choose manual labor for building an eBook over an automated approach.
Plus, Apple lists resources for commercial and community-created Pages templates. When Pages has been extended to handle eBooks, sites such as ePub Zen Garden will be a quaint (though still nightmarish) memory.
That day cannot arrive soon enough.
For writers as well as readers.
Previously here:
What REALLY Delayed The Apple Tablet
Part Of The eBook Vision
What One Big Change Would An Apple iTablet Bring?
Dumb eBooks Must Die, Smart eBooks Must Live
ALL eInk Devices: BAD For eBooks!
Posts
2 comments:
Indeed I wouldn't.
Making my book trailer using MS Movie Maker (which I had NEVER USED before) was easier than marking up an XHTML ebook by hand, to say nothing of EIGHT of them.
I have always wondered why it was so easy to add QT Movies to a "Pages" layout but the resulting document could never be saved as a standalone version. The document can only be saved as a word processing file or PDF neither of which can play the embedded QT video.
You may be on to something here. "Pages" may indeed be the authoring gateway to Apple ebooks.
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