imagined future

Today, Make Books Australia is the product of a two-decade-plus saga to create a specialist imprint – a niche publishing house able to offer high-quality image-rich limited-interest titles.
In the beginning, during the dying days of the last Century, the aspiration was to create and distribute design- and image-driven titles – using high-quality print production – to serve specialist reader groups. Achieving this goal would require three capabilities:
• capability one – hardware and software to support efficient creation of the production files needed to generate stunning high-quality ‘titles’
• capability two – flexible cost-effective book ‘printing’ that did not involve speculative capital-demanding pre-printing
• capability three – efficient local/global distribution able to receive and satisfy book orders.

For several years, advances in hardware and software enhanced the first and third capabilities. While dramatic advances in printing technology reduced cost, improved quality and increased flexibility – but only for a pre-print model.

Capital costs per title remained too high for Make Books Australia to create a critical mass of published titles. Even the most optimistic sales projections suggested, at best, questionable economics. So, despite quite spectacular advances in physical book production, this traditional path to publishing still did not stack-up financially. The specialist imprint dream continued to be an imagined future.

glimmer of hope

The next publishing advance – with potential to make the imagined specialist imprint a reality – was around improved digital printing harnessed by a rush of global print-on-demand services. Here, was potential to eliminate capital-intensive initial print runs.

Print-on-demand services also helped to satisfied the third capability. Their ability to transfer production files to printing/binding centres in different global locations meant they could produce an ordered book closer to the purchaser, and so reduce delivery time and cost.

While print-on-demand services provided a glimmer of light in the boutique publishing darkness, its flame remained too weak to ignite, and sustain, a viable business model. Most print-on-demand services could offer a cost-effective per-book price for trade titles. However their cost structures for reasonable-sized photo books on quality paper pushed pricing beyond that which most book buyers were prepared to pay, particularly when author royalties, production expenses, and a modest profit were included. And then there was the added cost of postage/delivery.

The glimmer of hope for a specialist imprint dream faded, again.

kissing the ebook frog

Many early ebooks were pdf files of questionable quality, often without, or when present, dubious rights management making mass and crippling piracy easy. Or these ebooks were text files with severely limited capacity for grey-scale illustrations that barely rose above the quality of line diagrams. Neither options were practical paths for distributing high-quality photo books.
A major ebook advance, which again stirred the Make Books Australia dream, occurred on the 27th January 2010, during an Apple press event, when Steve Jobs revealed the first iPad. Here was the key to a potential ‘book’ publishing revolution – eliminating ‘printing’ costs, providing stunning quality ‘slides on a light-box’ images, offering multi-media inclusions, all tied with a powerful interactivity bow. A world of ‘book’ possibilities was on offer.
The event also addressed cost-effective on-demand distribution with the Apple Books store. Here was on-demand title delivery, through a trusted global supplier, with robust digital rights management to curtail piracy. The one major limitation – an iPad was required to ‘read’ these books.
Alert, but not fully engaged, Make Books Australia watched. There remained one missing element – effective multi-media book creation and production software. Titles on iPad remained little more than glorified pdfs, though with relatively high-quality images.
On 19th January 2012, Apple released iBooks Author – innovative ebook production software that supported the creation of high-quality multi-media ebooks for ‘reading’ on iPads. Some fifteen years after that first imagined publishing future, finally, it appeared possible to create a specialist image-based publishing capacity. To build an economically viable imprint offering a flexible and cost-effective path to publishing limited-interest image-driven titles. Distribution would be restricted to those with access to iPad. Against that limitation was the potential to reimagine the very idea of a ‘book’.

potential, potential …

Make Books Australia experiments with iBooks Author were more than promising. Here, potentially, were tools to revolutionise the form of a book as dramatically as had the Gutenberg Press in 1440. The tools to completely redefine the ‘book’ with high-quality typesetting and images, video and audio, and structures and interactivity never before possible. Here was a radical new twenty-first Century approach.

The first Make Books Australia interactive ebook title was published 0n 23rd June 2014 – Textures alpha – exploring surfaces. The title tentatively explored interactivity possible with iPad/iBooks Author. The title was a proof-of-concept that hinted at the potential of this software and hardware combination. Work also began on the flagship Make Books Australia title – Treason: Claus von Stauffenberg and the plot to kill Hitler. Here was an opportunity to stretch the very concept of a ‘book’. To bring history alive in an exciting, engaging and previously impossible way. To augment an historically accurate page-turning saga with extensive contemporary photos, animation, audio and video – with interactivity enabling readers to access additional information at the touch of a finger.
In-house experiments suggested even more exciting potential. Other creators were pushing boundaries with interactivity and structure – their ‘books’ appeared with reader-generated story paths and media smorgasbords. The door to a radically different, and exciting new, ‘book’ world was opening.

crushed on rocks of indifference

The first iteration of iBooks Author was very limited. It lacked many basic capabilities found in most contemporary professional book publishing software.
As the years passed, limitations of iBooks Author became a serious impediment, resulting in inefficient workflows and compromised output. Almost every ‘add feature’ request was ignored. The very occasional upgrades were inconsequential – glaring omissions in capability continuing.
The painful, frustrating, end point was, with each passing year, becoming more inevitable. On the 10th June 2020, via email, Apple announced iBooks Author software would be removed from the App Store on the 1st July 2020. That initial ebook kiss, offering so much, did not in the end reveal a princess or prince – just a frog – unrealised potential crushed on the rocks of indifference.

Hopefully, in the years ahead, a software developer will ‘get’ the potential in moving ebooks beyond glorified pdfs by providing tools for creators to access the extraordinary possibilities locked within existing electronic readers. Or, at least, resurrect tools to access the multi-media, interactive potential we had for that brief, glorious, moment. And, possibly, with the imagination to help creatives explore the very concept of what a ‘book’ can be, with commitment to stay the course. Not to be distracted by some other shiny thing.

rescued by paper pulp

Meanwhile, Make Books Australia has developed workflows and distribution systems based on traditional book production, combined with variations on short-run and on-demand printing, to service the specialist markets it developed while interactive ebooks was a thing. So, here we are, almost six hundred years after Gutenberg’s extraordinary technological breakthrough – and for all the promise of today’s silicon-based innovation – the most reliable, cost-effective and reader-friendly means of producing quality image-rich books remains based on paper pulp.

Just out of reach, are technology-based tools that could allow imaginative authors, multi-media artist, designers and publishers to reimagine the very concept of a ‘book’ – tools that could be used to build and sustain a new publishing world as transformational to the book form as was Gutenberg. Tools to support ‘book’ creation only limited by a creator’s imagination and a reader’s delight.