Local Beagle now on iBookstore shelf!

‘Play Colours with Zooby’, a pre-school colour book, starring local Beagle, Zooby, is now also available as an ebook from Apple’s iBookstore.

Earlier this year, as an Author and local IT business person, I set myself a personal challenge to learn how to create rich media ebooks.

There was a lot to learn even though I already had IT knowledge and experience.

I was surprised by how much fun I had finding out what would be involved and how many hoops I would need to jump through to get as far as Apple’s iBookstore. I had already set up a publishing division of my business, Redmond McLean Ltd, when I published the original print version of the pre-school book in 2011. From here I had to get to grips with the IRS in America to obtain the necessary identity number before Apple would even consider dealing with me.

The coding was probably the easiest part!

There is information on the internet about how to create basic ebooks but Apple keep their guidelines for approved distributors so I had to be approved by Apple before I could meet their ebook criteria. Also there are a limited number of people in the world with experience with rich media ebooks. I would like to count myself amongst them now.

In 2010/11 we created a colour book for pre-school children. I worked on this as a project with my son Alasdair and we used Jack Newman of Boo Design to help us realise the graphic design top quality colour brief and layout and Penny Rowling of PR Photography for the fantastic quality photos. Zooby is our own dog and Penny described him as the naughtiest dog she had ever had in her studio! I don’t think he disgraced himself quite as much at Jack’s but he did take a fancy to the rug in her office!

Following on from the publication of the printed book it seemed a natural step to start exploiting my IT skills and move on to an ebook version hence my personal challenge.

After a lot of work I successfully delivered a read aloud audio/coloured text synchronisation ePub version to Apple. It passed quality control and you can now get a free ebook sample delivered to your iPad or iPhone by searching iTunes for ISBN: 9780956819215, published 25 May 2012.

I enjoyed coding this so much I would love to do more and have already started working on a German language version with more to follow.