by Joseph T. Sinclair

What’s a bookapp? Noth­ing more than a book in the form of an Apple or Android app. A tap on a bookapp icon brings to life a dig­i­tal book almost iden­ti­cal to an ebook. The dif­fer­ence is that you can include diverse media, embed­ded pro­gram­ming, and the like with­out restriction,

Just as web work and the inter­net were too impor­tant to leave to pro­gram­mers, apps are also too impor­tant to leave to pro­gram­mers. Apps were in the pro­gram­mers’ realm for the first decade of mobile com­put­ing, but the inevitable app author­ing soft­ware has now become wide­ly avail­able to enable the rest of us to eas­i­ly make apps.

A mul­ti­tude of app author­ing soft­ware and ser­vices is now avail­able. The author­ing soft­ware will get bet­ter, eas­i­er, and less expen­sive putting the cre­ation of bookapps well with­in the reach of indi­vid­ual authors and small publishers.

Iron­i­cal­ly, major pub­lish­ers have gen­er­al­ly not pub­lished bookapps because of the high pro­gram­ming costs. That has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly with the advent of app author­ing soft­ware, and the major pub­lish­ers are now faced with a dilem­ma. To pub­lish in the ebook for­mat or to pub­lish in the bookapp for­mat? That is the ques­tion. The for­mer may be a dead end for many gen­res in the long run. The bookapps are priced quite low.

Although HTML5 has become the stan­dard for the web, it is also quick­ly becom­ing a gen­er­al pub­lish­ing stan­dard. Thus, if you can code HTML (and any­one can), you can cre­ate an attrac­tive bookapp. Many of the app author­ing pro­grams are sim­ply con­ver­sion pro­grams that trans­late HTML5 pages into bookapps. And EPUB (ebooks) and HTML5 are expect­ed to merge at some point in the future, mean­ing that there will be just one set of markups (one code set) for both.

Of course, although it’s help­ful to be able to code in HTML, you don’t real­ly have to in order to cre­ate a bookapp. Most HTML author­ing soft­ware pro­vides you with a WYSIWYG inter­face that makes HTML cod­ing just as easy as using a word processor.

The app author­ing soft­ware is all over the place in pric­ing, some inex­pen­sive but most expen­sive. As the indus­try matures, how­ev­er, author­ing soft­ware will become ubiq­ui­tous and inex­pen­sive. It’s clear that because of author­ing soft­ware, bookapps are no longer the purview of pro­gram­mers. And the dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing of books will embark on a new course.