to the making of books there is no end, so let's get started!
Everyone likes free stuff! Now through the end of the year, Rolled Up Dimensionality: Short stories from a forgotten life, is free on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod! The book is a collection of SciFi short stories inspired somewhat by the great pulp classics of the 1950’s and 60’s.
If there’s enough interest, the good folks at Amazon and Barnes & Noble may let me drop the price to free for the Kindle and Nook versions as well!
Even as comic and manga publishers fret over the future of their media as the digital transition takes hold, it’s a great time to be a reader! The last few days I’ve been rediscovering comics in digital form with the help of iPhone readers from Dark Horse, comiXology, and Viz.
Growing up, keeping up with the comics I liked was not an easy task. If I had the money there was the very real problem of getting to the nearest comic shop which for me was at the top of a very steep hill near Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza. Eventually I moved on to other books only revisiting comics latter for the occasional Batman graphic novel release.
My first glimpse of what comics could be on a portable device came when the Digital Comics service debuted on the PSP. The guided, panel to panel mode was the perfect way, for me at least, to read comics on that big beautiful screen! That was back in 2009 and digital books hadn’t really taken hold of my conciousness and the PSP was not something that I carried around with me all the time, so the thought of turning it into a reader and building a library on it was not something I was ready to do.
Fast forward two years to the iPhone, a device I usually have on my person which between 3G and Wi-Fi is almost always on the network. And with a display screen nearly as large as the PSP and much more available storage space, using it as a reader only awaited the right apps. Well it looks like the right apps have arrived!
David Hutchison's Re-imagining of Oz in Manga Form
Last Saturday was Free Comic Book Day, so I decided to give reader apps from Dark Horse, comiXology, and Viz, a workout. I started thinking about this originally when Viz released their manga reader for iPhone and iPod touch. Being iPadless, I was curious to see how manga fared on the iPhone’s much smaller screen.
The iPhone version of the Viz reader was a bit of a disappointment. While manga are clear and readable, you have to manually pan and zoom. Not only that, all reading is done in portrait mode. Twilt your iPhone all you want, that picture is not rotating. This would not be all bad except for the fact that I knew of a better way to read graphic novels in that form factor.
Both the Dark Horse and comiXology readers gave a much more enjoyable reading experience. The key to this being their guided panel to panel reading mode. It makes reading a comic somewhere between viewing a slideshow and a movie. Both were easy to use, though I felt that the Dark Horse app performed a little better overall. And both Dark Horse and comiXology allow you to read titles in your library online in a web browser. Right now it doesn’t look like you can read Viz manga from your in app library on a computer. That’s an interesting omission given that Viz does make several of its Shonen Jump manga titles available for online reading.
As a manga reader, it’s a little disappointing that Viz’s reader is not quite up to the standard set by the digital comic readers. But I’m sure we’ll see improvements in later releases. In the meantime, I’m having a lot of fun rediscovering comics such as David Hutchison’s Oz: The Manga, which looks great on my iPhone!
My first two eBooks, Anime Aftershocks, and Rolled Up Dimensionality, are now available on the iPad! While it is true that the Kindle and Nook versions of these books can also be read on the iPhone and iPad using their respective reader apps, going forward it is important to have an iBooks version available as well.
Despite its higher price, the iPad has become an important eBook reader and platform. And after what I saw at C2E2 this past weekend in Chicago, the iPad is likely to become the dominant eReader for digital comics and manga. So how does one publish an eBook on the iPad? The short answer is with money and some effort. Right now it is harder and more expensive to publish on the iPad relative to the Kindle or the Nook.
The first thing you’ll need to publish on the iPad is a Mac capable of running iTunes Producer. This is the application you will use to actually bundle and upload your book to the iTunes Store. You’ll have to join iTunes Connect to gain access to iTunes Producer. So if you do not have a Mac and are not comfortable or inclined to the technical side of things, then you’d be best served to publish your eBook through a 3rd party such as Smashwords which publishes on multiple platforms including iPad. Obviously, this will reduce your share of any sales, but it will take the messy technical stuff out of the equation for you.
Next, you’ll need to buy ISBN numbers for your eBooks. Even if you already have an ISBN for a print version of your book, you’ll need to get a unique number for the eBook version. Currently, you can buy a block of 10 numbers for $250 USD from the Bowker web site. The process is relatively straight forward and while you can buy a single number for $125, clearly if you plan to publish more than one book in your lifetime, it is more cost effective to buy a block of numbers. Publishing on the Kindle or Nook doesn’t require an ISBN, but if you feel that you may want to publish on the iPad at some point, it’s a good idea to just bite the bullet and buy the numbers up front. I look at it as added incentive to write more eBooks!
In my case I already had my eBooks in ePub format which Apple requires for iPad books. And because these books had already passed muster on the Kindle and the Nook, I thought I was home free to publish on the iPad. This was not the case. I discovered that Apple has more stringent requirements than Barnes & Noble or Amazon. To figure out why my eBooks were failing the ePub checks during my upload attempts, I used the ePubChecker app from Rainwater Soft. The cause of the errors turned out to be pretty minor. In one case it was caused by a missing alt property in an image tag and in another, a div tag nesting issue. This is somewhat reminiscent of how early versions of Internet Explorer allowed some pretty messy HTML that other browsers would not be too happy to display properly. This made it easy to write pages for IE at the expense of teaching some pretty bad page authoring habits. So while finding and correcting the errors was a hassle, the lessons I learned will yield higher quality eBooks in the future.
Once I fixed the errors, uploading my eBooks to the iTunes Store was easy. Then it was time to wait for them to be processed and approved by Apple. As one might imagine, Apple likely receives hundreds, if not thousands of submissions per week. It took about 10 days before the books cleared and went on sale in iBooks. I did not receive a notification email to inform me of this. You just have to keep checking your book status on iTunes Connect.
Now on sale, it was time to do some marketing. This article describing how to link to books in the iBooks Store made it easy for me to construct the proper links to my iPad eBooks. The format required is as follows.
http://itunes.apple.com/[country code]/book/isbn[your book’s isbn]
So my links are
Anime Aftershocks:Â http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/isbn9780983358503
Rolled Up Dimensionality:Â http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/isbn9780983358510
So that’s it! The first time through was fairly challenging, but having done it, I’m confident now that supporting the iPad won’t require much additional effort. Indeed, it’s actually improved my overall eBook publishing process!
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