Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Chris Heath on January 20, 2012 at 7:31pm

Here's a link to the page about iBooks Author

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Permalink Reply by Kai Weber on January 21, 2012 at 3:42am

It's certainly a game changer in legal terms, since the EULA stipulates that any book created with iBA is either given away for free or sold through Apple exclusively, see http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-ev...

When I'm publishing a book, I don't want one shop to tell me I can't sell it through other shops.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Heath on January 21, 2012 at 10:04pm

Hi Kai

When I posted this discussion, I hadn't considered the legal gumpf. The zdnet response seems to be an emotional one. I don't really see what all the fuss is about.

My understanding is that Apple is providing a publishing and distribution channel for an author's content. You can give away the finished iBA file, or you can sell it through Apple's distribution channel. You are not permitted to sell the Apple formatted file in competition with Apple's efforts to sell your work. This seems fair enough to me.

I would expect that a contract with any other publisher, would preclude me from popping down the road to another publishing house and signing up with a competitor, or selling copies I printed myself to capitalise on my publisher's investment and efforts to sell my work.

I could be wrong, but the only difference I see, is that with the Apple contract, you can author the content in another app and sell it elsewhere, e.g., as a non-interactive book.

Even if I'm wrong on this point, I think there will be a lot of authors (and perhaps publishing houses) looking to capitalise on the opportunity, just as many software developers have done successfully with the iDevice and Mac app stores.

Legal gumpf aside, the interactive book could change the way we, as technical writers, work. Even for some of my clients, an interactive book could reduce training costs quite dramatically compared with the current offerings of paper-based user and training manuals, online help and/or stand-up training. So it may not be long before we are asked to produce interactive books for use on portable devices.

If only I had something ready to publish for the education market!

Cheers

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Permalink Reply by Kai Weber on January 22, 2012 at 3:11am

I think the comparison with conventional publishers doesn't hold because a dead-tree book publisher has invested efforts and money into my book by editing it, doing a layout and printing it. I agree that my publisher should be able to protect that investment. But even for dead-tree books, that protection is often limited to the short time when a book is available in hardcover only. Many authors get a separate licensing deal for the subsequent softcover edition.

As far as I can see, Apple invests no efforts and preciously little money for storage in my book, so what is there to protect? I would want the right to sell the same content that I edited and laid out myself as e-book with other stores as well.

Cheers, Kai.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Heath on January 22, 2012 at 1:25pm

Hi Kai

Good point about editing.

I was thinking of authoring an interactive user guide for a client's product that can be given away with the product. I'm about to start a user guide for the product, so I may use iBA alongside Word, even if only for my own edification for now.

Hopefully, this isn't at odds with the EULA. I'll have to take another look.

Cheers

Chris

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Permalink Reply by Mark Baker on January 22, 2012 at 8:57pm

It seems to me that most of the discussion of this is missing the point. The reason for that Apple wants exclusive rights to publish content created with this tool is not that they don't want the author to sell it elsewhere, but that they don't want anyone to be able to read it on a non-Apple device. It is not the author's money they are after (though they will take it). It is the reader's money.

They are in a battle royal with Amazon, which is not simply a battle between competing companies, but a battle between two business models. Apple uses content to sell hardware. It makes its money off the hardware sales. Amazon uses hardware to sell content. It loses money on every Kindle and makes it money off content sales. Apple and Amazon have been a chess match for a while as Apple tries to find ways to keep people from shopping in the Kindle store from the iPads.

Apple wants exclusive content in the iTunes store to keep people locked into high priced iHardware. Rights of authors are no part of this equations. This is, of course, how Apple has done business for years. Their business practices have been what most people would consider evil (and do condemn as evil) for a very long time. Somehow, Steve Jobs was able to create a perception filter so that few people saw Apple in that light. Now he's gone, its amazing to see all the Apple-is-evil press that is coming out. Apple hasn't changed, but somehow now we see it in a clearer light.

Apple is a closed-architecture company and always has been. They justify high margins through exclusive capability. But they are fighting the capability war against the entire rest of the tech world and they can't possibly win that fight (as they could not win it with the Mac). Thus they look to use legal means to try to maintain exclusive capability, or exclusive content, to buttress those margins. Thus they have become the world's biggest patent troll, and thus this EULA.

As to the difference between this and regular publishers, Doubleday did not sell typewriters and tell anyone who bought them that if they created a book on their typewriters they could only sell it through Doubleday, and if Doubleday rejected it, they could not offer it to Harper Collins.

General advice: never create any content in a captive file format.

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Permalink Reply by Kai Weber on January 23, 2012 at 2:34am

Thanks, Mark, for putting it all into context. I had seen most of the pieces of this puzzle, but haven't been able to put them together so sensibly.

Not sure if I want to be caught in the middle if two giant corporations want to duke it out, so I'll follow your advice and try to use open file format and smaller publishers and distribution channels.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Heath on January 23, 2012 at 2:21pm

In addition to publishing your book as an iBook through Apple, you can still author your document in another app and sell it through another channel as an ePub document, PDF, or paper book. I don't believe the iBA EULA stops you from doing this.

Anyway, I never intended this discussion to be about licensing or Apple. 

When I asked the question "Do you think it is going to be a game changer for our industry?" I was referring to the potential of using interactive books (of which the iBook is an example) for product manuals on handheld devices in years to come.

So for example, if a client wants an interactive manual to give away with a product, e.g., a piece of machinery, where do we, as technical writers, fit into the equation.

There may be some of us who will take a multi-disciplined approach and try to do it all.

Alternatively, it might be that an editor or art director co-ordinates a range of specialists working together as a team, for example:

• a 3D animation guru for creating 3D product simulations
• a film specialist to shoot and edit video
• a narrator for voice overs
• a HTML/CSS/Javascript guru for creating interactive 2D animations, and
• a technical writer to take care of the words.

Even though the demand for such a manual may not yet exist, I think it could happen soon, especially if it has the potential to reduce a product's learning curve.

Your thoughts?

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Permalink Reply by Mark Baker on January 23, 2012 at 3:02pm

I'm struggling to see how this is significant for tech pubs, for two reasons:

1. The traditional manual is rapidly being eclipsed by topic-based content, much of it produced by the community in the form of forum posts etc. The two basic problems with a manual as a PDF seem to apply equally to a manual as e-pub: linear as opposed to topic structure, and isolation from the rest of the relevant content on the web. Tech pubs is moving from isolation to the web. I can't see a reason for it to reverse course and go back to isolation again. Tech pubs on tablets? Certainly. But through the web.

2. Corporations are seemingly less and less willing to fund extensive documentation. Whether that is because they simply don't care, or they have done the math and the ROI just isn't there, I don't know. But if companies are not willing to fully fund static manuals, what makes us think they are going to be willing to spend the considerably greater amounts of money it would cost to fund interactive ones? Sure, customers may think they are cool for a while, but that will wear off, and in the end it does not matter how much the customer thinks the interactive manual is cool unless they actually end up buying more product as a result.

Will we see some interactive manuals? Certainly. There are some already, and have been for a long time in certain sectors where they make a real difference. Will it revolutionize technical communication? I can't see it. I'm waiting for someone to show me the money.

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Permalink Reply by Richard S. on January 23, 2012 at 3:19pm

As I was collecting my thoughts, Mark posted pretty much what I was going to say about manuals vs information.  The only other points I wanted to make were: 

a) I'm failing to understand the hype. Everything I've seen in ibooks demos I can already do in a contemporary web browser (which tablets have). If I want to do this and give it away, why bother with the iBookstore?

b) Since there's no new technology here, and folks producing tech docs already do all of these things, I don't think this affects tech authoring much at all. 

I do suspect that, like the App store, this will present business opportunities. 

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