Unbound: Inkling Announces the New Standard for Professional Publishing

Last night, at a private event at Jazz at Lincoln Center with more than 400 publishing industry leaders, we announced the public launch of Inkling Habitat, a collaborative digital publishing environment designed for professionals.

Paired with the recently launched Inkling Content Discovery Platform, which enables unparalleled online discovery for book content, Inkling is now the first and only end-to-end solution for building, marketing, and distributing high quality digital books at scale.

As I discussed in a post in last month, the digital book market has been dominated by a single player for the last five years. The product model–essentially a 10-dollar text file–works well for literary fiction but not much more. What about the massive market of beautiful, curated content that hasn’t yet found a home in digital? From textbooks to travel books, cooking, hobbies, medicine, and more, this simple product model is bound to give way to the media-rich, interactive experiences that mobile devices were built for.

With last night’s public launch of Inkling Habitat, we’ve answered the question of how this type of content will thrive. As we continue to iterate on our best-in-class apps for iOS, the web, and–coming this year–Android, we’re also sharing a powerful new way for publishers to create beautiful, media-rich consumer and technical books that makes it easy for customers to find and buy them.

Here’s the gist of our announcement in more detail:

Inkling Habitat is the first collaborative digital publishing tool designed for professionals. Using Habitat, publishers will finally have the tools to build high-quality digital content they’re proud of. With Habitat, publishers can:

• Collaborate seamlessly from anywhere in the world
• Build delightful interactive content experiences, and
• Publish to multiple platforms with one click.

The Inkling Content Discovery Platform (“the CDP”) unlocks book content on Inkling so that it can be indexed by search engines like Google and read by users for free, right when they want it. Every section inside an Inkling book has its own URL that can be indexed by search engines or shared individually, letting readers more easily discover, share, and purchase the book content they are looking for. And with content that can be discovered, distributed, and purchased via the Inkling Store, the App Store, or third parties with standards-compliant EPUB exports, the opportunity for incremental revenue is unlimited.

This ecosystem is more than just our vision for the future; it is already becoming a reality in the present. As of the launch last night, more than two dozen existing publishing partners call Inkling home, including McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Wolters Kluwer, Elsevier and Wiley, while popular brands like Frommer’s, For Dummies, Kaplan, and O’Reilly have already had their content built using pre-release versions of Habitat.

Additionally, we’re thrilled to announce new publisher commitments for 2013:

• HarperCollins
• TIME, Inc
• DK
• Rick Steves
• Lonely Planet
• Wall Street Journal

Stay Tuned: Tools of Change Announcement Up Next
On Wednesday, February 13, I’ll be giving a keynote address entitled “Unbound” at the annual O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference in New York City to share this announcement with attendees. If you’re interested, you can watch the livestream of that address here at 9:35 am EST, and we’ll also be live-tweeting it from @InklingHabitat, with the hashtag #unbound.

Already eager to try Habitat for yourself? Register here and learn more at inklingelemdev.wpengine.com/habitat, so you can start messing around on your own for free!