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Tech Desk
From the Tech Desk
New Software Update Allows for End-to-End Publishing and Enhanced eBook Support, All from Your Desktop
Looking for a new eBook delivery platform for your enterprise or independent publishing needs? Look no further. Earlier this summer, Impelsys, a New York-based company that specializes in providing electronic content delivery, released the fifth incarnation of its acclaimed iPublishCentral software. For those unfamiliar with iPublishCentral, the program is quite versatile, allowing users to manage, publish, deliver, market, or analyze the success of their books or publications, all from a slick and intuitive user interface. In other words, iPublishCentral puts the full capability of a publishing company literally at your fingertips. Authors can create a library of their work on the program’s dashboard, and from there, the possibilities are nearly limitless.
Ask any question and chances are that iPublishCentral has an answer for you. Do you want to distribute your books to the major eBookstores around the web? iPublishCentral offers easy integration with big-name storefronts like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as with lesser-known entities like Overdrive and Blio. Do you need to play around with your book pricing schemes? iPublishCentral allows for half a dozen pricing options, from full downloads to rentals, from subscriptions to chapter-by-chapter sales. And if you need to see how many people are accessing your library, similar customization options are available in the program’s marketing offerings. You can read sales reports, monitor your web traffic, or handle redemption codes, all from the same dashboard you use to publish and price your book offerings.
But while iPublishCentral is a wildly efficient means of managing a selection of electronic titles, Impelsys has made a point of adapting the software to meet the needs and wants of modern readers. Part of that relates back to Impelsys’ commitment to electronic delivery, which is on full display in the latest version of iPublishCentral. Not only does iPublishCentral 5.0 facilitate the delivery of content to a wide range of devices—from laptops to tablets to smartphones—it also, in the words of Impelsys CEO Sameer Shariff, takes one step further in advancing the book delivery process, opting to view eBooks less as an evolution of printed texts and more as a flexible and interactive form of software.
“This new release of iPublishCentral is a breakthrough from our development team as it illustrates our approach to thinking of the book as software itself, where publishers can really make eBooks jump off the screen and connect in magical ways with their readers,” Shariff said in a June press release, following the release of the newest version of iPublishCentral.
The biggest breakthrough of iPublishCentral 5.0 over previous versions of the software is its ability to support what Shariff and the rest of the Impelsys team call “enhanced eBooks.” Known in some circles by different terms—“book apps,” for example—an enhanced eBook offers a multimedia approach of which young readers and educational audiences are especially appreciative. Allowing for everything from games to audio clips, interactive visuals to instructional videos that play in the middle of the text, more and more authors, both on the major publishing circuit and in the independent publishing world, are embracing the use of multimedia content in their books. With iPublishCentral 5.0, Impelsys has recognized the importance of offering a more well-rounded reading experience. It’s a major step for allowing independent authors to create not just bare-bones eBooks, populated by nothing by blocks of text and stock cover designs, but full-bodied interactive publications that take advantage of the many amazing features that modern tablet computers are capable of providing. In other words, it’s another step toward closing the gap between independent publisher and corporate houses.
The other improvements to the iPublishCentral 5.0 software aren’t as innovative as the program’s enhanced eBook support, but they are no less welcome. The latest version of Impelsys’ software includes support for epub 3 eBook files, improved marketing and sales reports, a handy personalized bookshelf feature, and an easier-to-use function for editing and displaying information on a book’s “Product Details” page. Perhaps most importantly, iPublishCentral 5.0 allows for distribution to Android-powered devices, indicating that Impelsys is working to get both their desktop publishing program and their iPublishCentral Reader application onto every platform possible.
If you are interested in learning more about iPublishCentral, head on over to the program’s website at iPublishCentral.com. There, you will be able to learn more about the program, see screen shots and videos of it in action, schedule a demonstration, or find out which publishers and organizations are currently using the program to deliver content to readers.
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Craig Manning is currently studying English and Music at Western Michigan University. In addition to writing for Independent Publisher, he maintains a pair of entertainment blogs, interns at the Traverse City Business News, and writes for Rockfreaks.net and his college newspaper. He welcomes comments or questions concerning his articles via email, at manningcr953@gmail.com.