iBooks Author vs. ePub Author
OS X Programmers/Companies: Read This
So, yesterday Apple launched the new iBooks Author application for the Mac. It looks great, produces fantastic dynamic content, and more than one person assumed that it was outputting ePub3 files. However, that was not the case, as is extensively documented by Daniel Glazman (co-chairman of the WC3 CSS working group) on his blog:
A wysiwyg EPUB3 editor will not be able to edit correctly an IBA document because of the different mimetype and the proprietary CSS extensions. iBooks Author is not able to reopen a iBook it exported in their pseudo-EPUB3 format because there is no Import mechanism! That means that on one hand EPUB3 readers cannot reuse a document created by iBooks Author because of its HTML/CSS/Namespaces extensions, and on the other iBooks Author cannot create an iBook from an existing EPUB3 document because it cannot import it.
In actuality, it even goes a little further than this.
I’ve been using iBooks Author for the last couple of days, and I am loving it. It seems like a great way to produce interactive books for the iPad, but leaves out all of the other e-readers. I’d love to see what comes of his idea to create an easy to use application for making standard interactive EPUB3 files.
