Inkling and the eBook revolution

I recently wrote about the potential that HTML5 is bringing to the eBook publishing ecosystem. One company is doing the most exciting things I've seen with this new kind of digital approach to publishing: Inkling.

Inkling started out as a textbook company, but over the past year they've been testing their publishing tool with other publishers for books outside of the education spectrum. What's most exciting for me is how they think about the concept of books. In their own words, here's how they describe "The Thinking Behind Inkling:"

When we set out to design Inkling, we thought about the assumptions people make, usually unconsciously, each time they create or consume a book.

Part of their innovative thinking is about the form of the book. When books are printed, they are presented in pages. That's how the content is split up and delivered. But when a "book" is presented in digital form, pages aren't a real thing- they're a construct of the digital layout that could be any of a number of things. Here's how they reason it out:

Take the concept of a page, for example. A page is a block of content divided by what “fits” into a given physical space...the page itself rarely represents a semantic break in the content. That is, a page is a page not because it makes sense for the content itself, but because that’s just what happened to fit.

Exactly. The core concept behind their way of thinking about digital "books" is that the page no longer needs to restrict how content is presented. With the iPad, books can act as digital objects, can contain not only links and images but video and other interactive content, and can be connected not just to other web pages but to Google and other search engines.

When a book is made with Inkling, it straddles the divide between a self-contained ebook and an interactive web object.

They have many great titles already in their marketplace. It's an exciting start. And they've opened their platform to be used by anyone who wants to write a book. If you're looking for ways to use HTML5 and other kinds of interactivity to expand the meaning of what a book is, I recommend checking them out.

Image courtesy of screenshot via Inkling.com