The writing is on the iPad: SaveYourself.ca will probably (finally) start producing books in a true eBook format

The iPad will probably change publishing forever, finally making eBooks a reality. SaveYourself.ca will be there.

About a year ago, standing on a sidewalk on Davie Street in downtown Vancouver, I showed my parents an eBook-reading app on my iPhone.

Their eyes widened in fascination. There were exclamations, and a stream of questions. That’s an entire book? How did you get it? Do you have others? How many fit “in” there? Suddenly they really wanted to touch it. I had previously shown them other apps — productivity apps, utilities, novelties, games — with relatively little effect. They are readers, so it was a reading app that got their attention.

Days later, they both had their own iPod touches, and were actively experimenting with buying and reading eBooks They quickly became more experienced than I am with the (poor) state of digital publishing industry. The discovered that the reading apps — there are several excellent ones — were way ahead of the supply of eBooks. eBooks are currently easy to read … but somewhat hard to get, with relatively few books available and a maze of ecommerce and licensing complications, proprietary formats, security issues, and so on.

The writing is on the wall

A year later, though, they are more or less up and running with a steady diet of eBooks on their iPod touches. My sixty-something parents are constantly reading eBooks. They favour the reading app Stanza, and they get their books from the Fictionwise eBookstore. Although many say that they can’t read a screen comfortably, my parents say it’s great: the bright, high-contrast, backlit screen makes text pop out. The font and text size can be changed easily, and read in either portrait or landscape format.

I believe that this is what is known as “the writing is on the wall.” The eBook cometh. A decade later than music, but it’s finally happening.

The iPhone eBook reading App, Stanza, is now how my parents do most of their reading.

Correction: The writing is on the … iPad.

The eBook cometh because Apple cometh. The iPad is built for many things, but reading eBooks most of all. Apple is going to shake up the publishing industry the same way it shook up the music industry. I believe that the iPad will change the way people read.

This isn’t a technology website, so I’m not going to get into an argument with the people out there who are rolling their eyes at the iPad. They can say it’s “just” a big iPod touch all they like: the user experience is going to be excellent, and my parents will buy one, and so will an awful lot of other people. And eBooks will become a big deal, fast.

ePub format

Apple surprised everyone by supporting the ePub format for it’s new device. It was nicest thing to do: ePub is a free and open e-book standard. Although I have no doubt Apple and it’s partner publishers will have measures in place to protect their intellectual property, the use of the ePub format is progressive and promising.

It is a move clearly intended to democratize eBook publishing, to make it more by the people, for the people. As with digital music, it will tend to encourage decentralization of the industry, cut out middle-men, and probably put fatter shares of the profit in the hands of authors. Sound too good to be true? Literally the day after the announcement, Amazon significantly changed its profit-sharing, suddenly giving authors a much larger cut.

Why the sudden Amazonian generosity? Because they can read the writing on the wall, too. Because they can hear a freight train coming down the tracks they’re tied to.

SaveYourself.ca will definitely go iPad

My “tutorials” are book-sized web pages with some simple interactive pages. Sometimes I call them eBooks, because they are books, and they are electronic, but they are not really “eBooks” — they are web pages. There are some really great advantages to that format, so I have resisted selling my eBooks in the “traditional” eBook format — PDF — for years now.

I’ve always hated PDFs. They are awful to work with and maintain, and customers have all kinds of problems with them. I’ve never seen PDFs as the future of reading — they were just a Band Aid for the mess of document formats from the 80s and 90s, something to get by on. They were never good for serious screen reading, and never will be.

The ePub format on the iPad does look like the future of digital reading. So it’s time to publish the SaveYourself.ca books in ePub format. It is time to get ready for the future.