Talk with any digital textbook publisher and they'll tell you why their competitor Inkling won't cut it: The startup's interactive digital books are pretty, sure, but it has only pumped out about 100 of them in three years.
It turns out, however, that Inkling was never much interested in making books.
[More from Mashable: Apple iBooks Author App Lets You Make Your Own Books, Free]
What they've actually been focused on is a book maker that publishers can use to create interactive books by themselves -- a tool that could interactive digital book publishing on its head.
The startup launched the cloud-based tool Habitat at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York Tuesday.
[More from Mashable: Textbook Makers: We’re Not Afraid of Apple’s Education Announcement]
It enables authors, editors and production partners to collaborate within one cloud-based dashboard rather than through FTP and FedEx. An editor could, for instance, flag a typo in a draft for a coder to fix by logging into the same place. Book editors can also update published books and push out the changes to already purchased books.
Inkling had previously been using publisher content to create digital books on their behalf. Now that publishers can use it themselves, the number of books Inkling can output is virtually unlimited.
"Publishers scale though people," CEO Matt MacInnis told Mashable. "We're engineers. We scale through technology."
Inkling competitors such as CourseSmart, Kno and Chegg offer libraries that number in the tens of thousands, but their books usually resemble those on the Kindle: digital versions of their paper counterparts, give or take a highlighting or search feature. While this format is ideal for novels or text-exclusive material, it often falls short for content such as textbooks or instructional material that benefit from interactive diagrams, photos and videos. Inkling aims to make creating interactive books as viable for publishers as copyting their paper versions to a digital format.
The startup also has its eyes on small publishers. It's partnered up with two digital content production services, Aptara and Innodata, to offer digital production services through Habitat. In the future, a publisher who wants to contract a designer to create an interactive module for his book will be able to do so directly through Habitat.
Serious courting of major publishers and small publishers alike is already well underway in the digital textbook arena. Most recently and notably is Apple's recent grab for the space. The technology company launched a new textbook experience for the iPad last month with partners McGraw-Hill, Peasron and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt all initially pricing a small handful of books at $14.99 or less. It also launched iBook Author, a tool that allows anyone to create a digital book.
MacInnis argues Apple's platform still doesn't make it easy for publishers to create high-quality books. The books currently offered, he says, were coded by hand.
Books on iBooks are also only available on the iPad. Inkling books, the startup announced on Tuesday, can now be read on any device with a browser thanks to a new HTML5 format.
But will publishers really choose to make and sell their lion's share of books through Inkling rather than Apple? We'll find out. But it's not an outrageous idea, especially since two of the biggest publishers -- McGraw-Hill and Pearson -- are already invested in Inkling.
Images courtesy of Flickr, Stanford EdTech
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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