On MediaBistro’s eBookNewser blog, they are chronicling “The Making of an eBook.” In the first installment at , the author says the indie publisher doesn’t want to create an eBook because they have to pay to format the book twice.
It must have been around 1996 that I heard Chris Gulker, who was then at Apple, talk about how all publishing will start with an XML repository and you can publish once, output in any format. Fast forward 14 years later, and it should be simple to go from print to web to e-book to mobile to x. But we have such a long way to go to make that a reality.
With all the buzz about e-books, there’s going to have to be an explosion in tools to create e-pub. We’ll see Adobe and someday eventually even in Microsoft Word (and open-source cloud word processors). But it should be now, it should be cheap, it should be integrated, and it should be seamless to go from print or web to e-book. If you have an elegant solution, I want to hear.
Posted by Kathy Sandler on Sunday, January 17, 2010 at 10:11 PM