On Wired’s Gadget Lab, Charlie Sorrel has a report on Book Creator for iPad, an intriguing program that turns the iPad from a device meant only for reading e-books to one that can also create them. Sorrel calls it “a kind of InDesign Lite”, that allows editing e-book format, putting text in boxes, adding pictures from the library, resizing, layering, and more.
Once done, the resulting book can be opened in iBooks or sent to Dropbox, and from there you can e-mail it to friends, kids (it’s a great way to make a children’s book) or submit it to the iBooks Store, safe in the knowledge that it meets all of Apple’s technical requirements.
At $7, the program will not break the bank of any would-be e-book makers. That being said, I’m still not sure how useful such a program would really be or who would want to use it. The tools available on computers are much more powerful, and given that most books would surely be written on a computer the text would be there already.
Still, I’m sure it will have its uses for at least some people, and will undoubtedly be worth the $7 purchase price for them.
I’m hoping that Pages for the iPad will get an “Export to ePub” option.
Still, I may have to check this out.