We talk to Laura Austin in the run up to the SYP's annual conference!

Posted on October 23, 2012 in Uncategorized

The book publishing industry has transformed rapidly in a short space of time. We’ve seen videos and music enhancing the reading experience and even more books being converted and released in a digital format. We’ve invited Laura Austin to tell us about her experience of using iBA at YUDU Media.

Laura works at YUDU Media and is always on the lookout for trade and education publishers looking to digitise illustrated content for the web, tablets and mobile. Laura’s first publishing job was at Pearson where she project managed and edited a range of digital and print products for ELT. Laura moved into her first sales position in 2008 and covered the UK, Ireland and Maltese Education Markets for Cengage Learning before moving to OUP as the ‘Digital Champion’ for the UK Sales team. She then moved to Brighton to join a Brighton-based tech start up, whilst co-founding BookMachine, a fast-growing community for the publishing industry.

Since 2003, YUDU have grown from strength to strength, and developed the world’s first self-publishing platform in 2007. The release of the iPad in January 2010 marked a key point in YUDU’s history and they have since enabled publishers to publish in excess of 250 iOS and Android Apps. In addition to this, YUDU have just launched a cross-platform educational product which will run on iOS, Android, Windows 8 tablets and desktops.

We ask Laura what iBooks Author means for trade publishers:

Working in iBooks Author can totally revolutionise your ebooks. By adding widgets your book can include slideshows, videos and dynamic 3-D animation. IBA was launched in January this year, and is a great example of how a book can be re-imagined and redesigned specifically for the iPad, and not only for education.

In reality, iBA development work isn’t as easy as it seems. For stunning multi-touch books, it is certainly the best tool out there, however, publishers have found the process itself timely and tricky and not quite as intuitive as predicted. YUDU media has an iBA team who have been working with some top publishers on re-imagining book content for this format. During the Game Changers seminar we will run through some of our experiences so far, and the main advantages we have found of working with iBA.