Is Apple About to Change the Publishing World by Launching a Sort of GarageBand for e-books?

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With the current process of publishing an e-book clearly harder than it needs to be, Apple might be getting ready to change the publishing world forever by making the process "as easy as creating a song in GarageBand."

Travel bloggers are often looking for ways to make money and one way that they have done so is by publishing their own e-books. For some travel bloggers, publishing an e-book is a way to reach a paying audience. Nomadic Matt (@NomadicMatt) has published a number of different e-books, one of which is titled "How to Make Money with your Travel Blog" and actually discusses creating e-books as a core way to make money.

In an article I stumbled across this morning on Ars Technic, Chris Foresman notes that:

[A]uthoring standards-compliant e-books (despite some promises to the contrary) is not as simple as running a Word document of a manuscript through a filter. The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand.
So far, Apple has largely embraced the ePub 2 standard for its iBooks platform, though it has added a number of HTML5-based extensions to enable the inclusion of video and audio for some limited interaction. The recently-updated ePub 3 standard obviates the need for these proprietary extensions which, in some cases, make iBook-formatted e-books incompatible with other e-reader platforms.

Sources tell Ars Technic that Apple will announce such a tool at their press event in New York City on Thursday.

Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis agrees that such a move would be very likely. Foresman asked the question of MacInnis, "Will Apple launch a sort of GarageBand for e-books?" His response? “That’s what we believe you’re about to see” (and our other sources agree). MacInnis continued, “Publishing something to ePub is very similar to publishing web content. Remember iWeb? That iWeb code didn’t just get flushed down the toilet—I think you’ll see some of [that code] re-purposed.”

So what does this mean for travel bloggers if Apple makes this announcement on Thursday? Are we about to see a flood of new e-books come out of the travel blogging community?

Image: Changhai Travis