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I'm looking at building some form of an eBook for iOS. By 'some form', I'm not yet sure what/how to build it.

The variables:

My skills: I'm fairly adept at front-end development, using HTML5, jQuery, CSS, etc. I've built an iOS app via Phonegap. I'm also a graphic designer so would like to retain some control over layout/typography/etc.

The type of book: It's primarily a picture book. Swipe between pages, perhaps a 'tap to see caption/details'. Perhaps some simple animations on some pages (fade out, slide-in...etc). Maybe a bit of sound (though that's not a priority). The one feature I'd really like to have is that it have an in-app purchase. For instance, 10 page book for free, in-app purchase do get the other 40 pages.

The options that I can think of off the top of my head:

  1. built it from scratch in Phonegap
  2. Use Apple's iBook Author
  3. Use another framework (within Phonegap our outside).

Regarding #1, that certainly seems viable, though I'd worry that I'm not taking advantage of some prebuilt frameworks already tailored towards book-type apps.

Regarding #2, this looks appealing for building. Does it handle simple animation OK? I'm also not sure if one can do in-app purchases in the context of an iBook (though there is some appeal in that, on average, it appears iBooks sell at a higher price than Apps).

Regarding #3, that's probably my main question: are there frameworks out there that have come out in the past year or two that I'm unaware of that are tailored specifically for making iBooks and/or iBook-like Apps?

DA.
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1 Answers1

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I've built both Phonegap applications and iBooks applications for my company -- for Phonegap, we used Monocle to get the paging behavior we wanted. It doesn't work perfectly (swiping proved problematic so we ended up only supporting tapping), but it allows HTML/JS/CSS and works well in the iOS UIWebView. We re-wrote it to use some CSS3 transitions, and we had to optimize it some more for performance (it doesn't handle huge books well), but it mostly works.

For iBooks Author, there's no way to do in-app purchases, but it's better in terms of re-flowable text, and the transitions between pages are much nicer. If you're trying to build a picture book, I'd start off looking at iBooks Author (there's also the ability to build HTML widgets, although that might not help you), since you can control the experience much better.

Waynn Lue
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