Inkling takes on Amazon, Apple with new e-book publishing tool

The launch of Amazon's first Kindle e-reader in 2007 upended the publishing industry. Now a San Francisco startup founded by a former Apple executive wants to shake things up again.
Inkling, which counts Sequoia Capital and publishers McGraw-Hill and Pearson among its investors, yesterday at an event in New York City unveiled a new digital book publishing tool for professionals, dubbed Habitat. It also launched the "Inkling Content Delivery Platform" to allow people to comb through books using search engines like Google and read limited amounts of content for free.

With its new products, Inkling aims to become the most-used platform for delivering "content you can use." And it hopes to put pressure on Amazon (and Apple, to a lesser extent) during the process.

"Amazon is killing the publishing industry," Matt MacInnis, Inkling CEO and founder, told CNET in a recent interview. "It has amassed too much market power, and every single entity in the industry is interested in overthrowing the [near] monopoly. ... If we're distributing content more efficiently than Amazon is, or even if we're only a fraction as successful as Amazon is, publishers still have a new revenue stream outside Amazon, and that's good for them."

Apple declined to comment, while Amazon didn't respond to requests for comment.
The digital book industry has become a big focus for many technology companies. So far, most e-books have been the text-heavy novels found in Amazon's Kindle store and other online bookstores. That has allowed Amazon to dominate the industry with about 60 percent market share, according to Forrester, and has forced some traditional bookstore owners, like Borders, to close. It also has forced publishers to merge and determine their strategies for a digital world -- something that has proved difficult for many.
A new push has emerged over the past couple years to create content that's not just digital but is also interactive and immersive. This has become particularly popular for textbooks, with startups and giants like Apple targeting the market.

MBS Direct Digital believes sales of such content will reach 10 percent of the total education textbook market this year, up from 6 percent last year and 3 percent in 2011, according to Rob Reynolds, director of the textbook distributor. Digital textbook sales are expected to rise to more than 50 percent by 2020, he added.

Apple unveiled its digital textbook strategy and self-publishing book software during an event last year at New York's Guggenheim Museum, saying at the time that it would revolutionize education. The electronics maker vowed that eventually, there would be digital textbooks for almost every subject and grade level and that individuals and publishers would use Apple's iBooks Author software to create those books.

Over the past year, Apple's textbook store has grown to about 200 titles from a handful at launch, and thousands of books have been published using iBooks Author.

But even as the market grows, a problem remains that publishers often don't have the tools to make truly interactive books. Publishers have traditionally used Adobe's InDesign to format their titles, but the technology hasn't adapted quite as well to a digital book model. And Apple's iBooks Author doesn't scale well for a large publishing company seeking to overhaul its content.
Inkling hopes Habitat changes all of that.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57568736-93/inkling-takes-on-amazon-apple-with-new-e-book-publishing-tool/