Making eBooks Just Got Really Easy
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Apple’s an odd company, sometimes. Most of what it launches, it does with great fanfare and marketing push. And sometimes, it slips something quite significant into a tiny, regarded update.
Last night, it pushed out an update to its [iWork](http://www.apple.com/iwork/ "iWork") office apps suite, which added the ability to create [ePub](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB "EPUB") documents to its Pages word processing and page layout app. ePub, for those who don’t know, is the open ebook standard that lies behind the iBooks store on the iPad and iPhone, as well as numerous other book readers.
That makes the entry cost for ebook creation under £60, according to the latest price for [iWork ’09 Retail](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0014X2UAK?ie=UTF8&tag=fishnefedora-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=B0014X2UAK)![]() on Amazon. You can sell the ePub format directly, and have people be able to use it in iBooks or any other reader that supports the standard. Or you could [sell it directly through the iBooks store](http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/052710-ibookstore-now-allows-individuals-to.html). Of course, ePub makers were already out there, but the general opinion was that they were [clunky and hard to use](http://www.macworld.com/article/150817/2010/04/epub_ipad.html). Pages, as you might expect from Apple, is a very slick and intuitive piece of software.
The eBook landscape just changed.
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