Holding out for an ePub hero

Macworld - Against my better judgment, I let myself get swept up by the wave of e-publishing rumors in the days leading up to Apple's education-themed announcement. Apple could do it, I thought to myself. The company had both the resources to build a great tool, and the reasons to do so.

The application Apple did release, iBooks Author, is impressive in some ways. It's free. Textbook publishers, teachers, comic artists, and others seeking an easy way to make rich, fixed-format iPad books should be thrilled. As Macworld editorial director Jason Snell points out, it will save a lot of people from having to create a dedicated app just to serve beautiful versions of their content.

But there are perhaps just as many caveats and concerns with Apple's new application. The iBooks Author end user licensing agreement is vague and worrisome. Like every program that came before iBooks Author, you can't edit ePubs directly; unlike programs such as Scrivener, Pages, and InDesign, however, this app's only purpose is to make books. And to top it all off, it won't even export the open ePub format Apple has long championed; instead, it makes proprietary .ibooks files.

Sure, iBooks Author is only version 1.0--and seeing as how I've defended Apple in the past for features missing from its 1.0 software, I probably should withhold my judgement for the time being. But I can't help but be disappointed.

The ePub format, a package of XHTML and CSS, has been available for almost five years, now. It's supported by numerous apps and devices, including Apple's iBooks, Google Books, and the Nook. Proprietary formats, like Amazon's KF8 and MOBI, use the same basic structure, but provide a better way to wrap the file in DRM (digital rights management). Between the Kindle Store, iBookstore, and Google Bookstore, the ebooks market has exploded.

And yet, our tools to build these books are as primitive as those for early 1990s HTML. There is exactly one program that can edit ePub files directly--Sigil--and while I applaud what the app strives to do, it's being worked on by just one developer and ported to multiple operating systems. As a result, it's unpolished, unoptimized for the Mac, slow, and bug-ridden.

Even so, Sigil is the best WYSIWYG editor on the market right now for the ePub format. If you don't want to use Sigil, you have only a few options: You can export your ePub from any number of other programs and hope it'll still look relatively the same as your original layout (not likely); hire a company who hand-builds custom ePubs (too expensive for most people); or attempt to code the entire thing yourself by hand--which, while admirable, is a pain-and-a-half if you're making a long book, or incorporating more than a few images.