First I heard from the Mac Users…What about me?
Apparently neither dnaml DesktopAuthor nor Flip Publisher Enterprise are capable of delivering a downloadable 3d page turning e-book to a Mac…Additionally Apple has no equivalent software.  The folks at dnaml have indicated they are working on a Mac version…but so far three emails to support have produced no time frame.  Flip Publisher Enterprise(ebook systems) claims to have a Mac reader, but testing demonstrated it is NOT compatible with leopard recent pre-leopard OS’.  They do offer a browser based reader that would probably work, but cost is prohibitive ($250 a month to host it).  So I bought a PDF converter (Nitro PDF professional – $99) and built a PDF file that I believe can be read by MACS, but it’s just palne old 2 dimesional.  I set it up with password security and encryption users who want to download it will have to buy a password, but they could easily copy it and give out the password…I have not investigfated more sophisticated security for PDF, but I believe it is available.

Next I heard from the MOBI crowd…What about me?  Ya, like you’re going to read a 300 page novel on your 2 inch screen.  But hey, Mobi pocket creator was free and it easily converted the PDF.  Then it let me upload to the ebookbase and suddenly it was for sale through various online retailers with full DRM capabilities.  But like I said…who wants to read 300 pages 2 inches at a time.

I’ve alreaded detailed my kindle experience…so the only one that’s left is Sony’s ebook format BBeB.  I’m looking into this one, but so far nobody has asked me for it. 

And let us not forget the formatting for hardcopy publication.  These guys want all spacing and special characters removed from your document.  The only thing they want is a hard carriage return at the end of a paragraph.  MS Word and RTF were the preferred formats for the document.  I just finished gutting my book in this fashion, I’m supposed to get the “publication formatted” proofs in the next week or so and then I will manually mark them up with any changes and ship them back.  I’ll keep you posted on this as well.