Steampunk Holmes on iBooks 1.3?

Apple iBooks

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post (The Platform Play: App Book Publishers) about app/book platforms and how I believe that attempting to build a business around creating an app/book platform is probably not going to work out for most folks - unfortunately, the app/book platform is the bet that most app/book publishers are making.  In that post I said that there just wasn't room for 20 or 40 different app/book platforms.  What I failed to mention, but what had been on my mind, is that the general eReaders are going to quickly catch up to most app/book platforms making the the use of custom 3rd party platforms less and less attractive.

Well, I just finished watching a video of a session from WWDC 2011 called, "iBooks: Create Beautiful Books with HTML5, CSS3, and EPUB", which demonstrates that the general eReaders are already catching up.  In fact, it struck me that I could do pretty much everything I want to do with Steampunk Holmes in iBook 1.3 using HTML5, CSS3, and EPUB that I was planning on doing using native iOS SDK.  The reference cards I spoke about in a previous blog post (Character Portraits for Steampunk Holmes) could be implemented as non-linear pages in a fixed layout.  The audio narrative synchronized with the text can be done with iBooks 1.3's new "Read Aloud" technology. Animations and effects can be accomplished using HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS because iBooks 1.3 uses standard WebKit to display pages.

It's not perfect (native iOS apps are far more flexible) but perhaps implementing this as an iBooks 1.3 EPUB document would be simpler, less expensive, and would garner more attention from Apple and the media.  After all, Apple's new Read Aloud technology applied to a 10k word book would be interesting in itself to Apple not to mention leveraging all the interactive capabilities made possible by WebKit.   I'm going to reach out to the Apple evangelist to find out just how much of WebKit is supported in iBooks 1.3 because my interpretation of the content in the session may be mistaken. If I'm not mistaken, than I'm going to seriously consider doing an iBooks 1.3 implementation first followed by an app/book implementation.   I should be able to use much of the content I create for the iBooks 1.3 EPUB document as source material for a native iOS app/book.