Simon Winchester tells us – from an author's perspective – what's involved in making a book version for the iPad.
The final weeks before the birth of a new book are always exciting and nail-bitingly tense for its author – and as I have a book about the Atlantic Ocean coming out in October, this is the waiting-outside-the-headmaster’s-study moment, with me hoping against hope all will be well.
But this year things are rather different, and that is because my publishers have seen fit to begin a bold experiment – to publish not just an e-book, which is simple to do and now rather old hat; but an enhanced iPad version of the book, which is a very different animal – and, moreover, to publish it at the same time as the hardback.
This is a major commercial experiment, and raises many questions:
- Will the iPad version eat into sales of what some call the ‘tree version’ of the book?
- How will sales be reported to the compilers of bestseller lists?
- And perhaps most important of all: will the iPad version be any good?
To make sure it is, we’re all working hard. The electronic whizzes here in New York have only just decided on this experiment – so we’re hastily amassing what are called our ‘assets’, and seeing where we might place them, with links, into the iPad version.
By assets the whizzes mean film clips, sound files, extra text, animations and footnotes that were dropped from the book for space reasons (I love footnotes, and usually have a hundred or so, of which fifty get in – so there are fifty free ones floating around on my computer, begging to be let onto the iPad).
Filming for the iPad
I’ve also been out filming: a crew came up to my farm to watch the writing process (which many find useful to learn about – as the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook so ably displays), and they’re about to take me out into New York harbour and on to the deep Atlantic. We’ve found wonderful old clips of the D-day landings, of codfish, of glaciers calving icebergs; sound recordings from the collision of the Torrey Canyon disaster off Cornwall, an animated play-by-play of the Battle of Trafalgar and another for the retaking of the Falkland Islands. All being stitched into place as we speak.
And the result will go on sale – and this is crucial – for less money than the book.
Will it work? Is life as we know it going to change? As I think about it, the nail-biting resumes – but even worse.
About Simon: Simon Winchester is the author of over 20 books. Atlantic: a Biography of the Ocean is published by HarperCollins. Read more about Simon on his website.
Now e-book readers, I find this a very interesting topic, because my mother actually owns one, and she enjoys using it, she says you can downloads PDFs from the local library for free and then they just expire. However, it never appealed to me, I always have reasons to like the actual book, however, I am hoping to purchase an iPad and will have the iBooks application on it, however, will I use it, because they are advantages to the current format and any writer who publishes in just e-books might have less of an advantage than let's say, someone who publishes in real books as well, because, it's alright if you can afford it but someone I can't imagine my eighty five year old grandmother trying to scrape up the money to buy one, however on the other hand, I think Apple taking on e-books is very interesting, but I would have to try out an e-book reader like the iPad to see if I would like it, I quite like the aesthetic appearance of it though, it would also be good for like school study as well and annotating because you can do that.