Here’s the secondary item in today’s event that may end up being more significant. iBooks Author is the Garage Band for books app that we’ve been mentioning for a few days now. You just drag a Word file into the app, it looks at style and scans it for how to create sections and headers and then it lays out the book. It works for any kind of book: novels, cookbooks, whatever. If you have an iPad connected to the app, it builds it in real time and i shows up on iPad. And you can also publish it right to the iBook Store. It’s also free.
All of a sudden anyone can publish a book if they have words to do it with.
Off the cuff, I think this means three things:
1. Publishing houses will have a lot less sway in the world because “being published” doesn’t mean as much anymore. Also, established authors can cut out the middle man.
2. There will be a whole lot of horrible crappy books out there available in electronic editions.
3. Plagiarism will be an issue (we mentioned this in yesterday’s memo) since people can just cut and paste.
This news is just now happening so I’d like to see how significantly different it is from Amazon’s self-publishing but at first blush I would say it comes down to Apple controlling the platform: you can go from raw file to published e-book in the same breath.
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
