Authoring secure e-books for iPhone using iSiloX
By Paul Biba
Adrian Graham, a British author, has written an excellent tutorial on this iSilo authoring program.
There’s a gap between the self-published writer and small press – it’s the micro press. It might not have any ‘official’ employees. They might be publishing their friends work or they could be an academic micro press publishing a PHD thesis. There could be any number of reasons why a micro press would want to sell securely protected documents, for copyright reasons, to track documents or for personal privacy.
When it comes to most ebooks this isn’t easy to do. Usually it’s done through online servers. It’s big business and no big business is likely to want to deal with a micro press. And further to this the publisher has no control over the secure protection. It’s out of their hands.Unless, that is, they use iSiloX.
iSiloX (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris) is the document authoring sister program to iSilo which creates iSilo files. With iSilo it’s the reader that costs money (£5.99 in the UK); the document authoring program is free.
January 28th, 2009 at 6:22 am
iSilo is a great publishing system with a fundamental flaw: The free, unregistered version of the reader application has severe limitations that make it impractical for any but the most simplistic publications.
As an E-publisher, I would have paid a healthy sum for the iSilo authoring software if a functional reader could be freely distributed. The program’s author, however, has never been sympathetic to changing his business model.