BookBake is now Kotobee!

Enhanced and rebranded

Thank you for being a good customer and baking your books with BookBake. After seeing your work and listening to your feedback, we have spent months silently working on big changes to this software. BookBake, now Kotobee, is as powerful as ever, and tweaked more towards mobile and tablets (Android and iOS). Web and desktop export options are still here as well.

Now you will be capable of inserting real interactive content in your ebooks. 3D, augmented reality, photo galleries, audio, video, interactive characters and animations! We will be sending you all the wonderful features in our next email.

Kotobee provides useful tools for education, such as note-taking, highlighting sentences, looking up words and sentences in Google or Wikipedia. And that's just a glimpse!

Feel free to visit Kotobee's website to go through all the features and try out a free version available.

At Sharjah International Book Fair 2012

A few weeks ago, we received an invitation to join the professional program for publishers at the SIBF (Sharjah International Book Fair) this year, 2012, to give our insight on a panel about ebook distribution. They found out about BookBake through a recently launched article at Publishing Perspectives (link here), thanks to Rachel Aydt for that well-written piece.

Despite changes right before the program, our panel title was changed to Lessons learnt from the Digital Revolution and moved to the last day of the program. The panel was chaired by Richard Charkin CEO of Bloomsbury Publishing (if you like Harry Potter, you should thank Richard), and the fellow panellists: Cameron Drew, director of Kobo, and George Lossius, CEO of Publishing Technology. There was meant to be a separate session before our panel, given by David Langridge, senior director at Microsoft, but the session was co-joined with our panel instead, so we had David accompany us on the table.

The panel went quite well, discussing lessons learnt (obviously) as well as predictions for the future of ebooks in the Arab market, which was mainly my input. Just to give you an idea, my keypoints were:

• An introduction to our BookBake, what it is, how it helps authors/publisher, and its Arabic compliance
• Challenges today with Arabic language in ebook technology and platforms - mainly revolving around Arabic fonts and right-to-left navigation
• It's not enough to rely on tablets for ebook distribution in the MENA region. The average person cannot afford a tablet.
• In a piracy-driven ecosystem, protecting content via technology is not the solution. Amazon and B&N disallowing access to their stores here is irritating, but justifiable.

On our way to the Chamber of Commerce, the first day of the program

Myself, alongside Humphrey Davies, a leading translator of Arabic literature, including The Yacoubian Building

Our panel hall. Hmmm, has something missing. The panelists! Well, only David Langridge lucky enough to grab this moment. The only photo I could get my hands on

The hospitality was superb, nothing less expected from the Middle East - great food, great accommodation, and a great program, organized by Midas PR from London.

BookBake web trailer

We have finally uploaded a web trailer for BookBake. It's accessible through the BookBake homepage and through youtube. Let us know what you think!

Getting ready for our second release

We are only days away from making a major BookBake release, which has a bunch of great new features that will make a difference to your ebook creation experience. Let us start with the conversion process.

Say you're an author, have a book published out in the market, and want to promote its awareness online - utilizing social media, etc. Obviously, due to publisher copyrights you cannot just display an electronic version of the book online. However, you may want to show a sneak peak of the book content, hopefully to direct interested readers to buy the book from the stores. We have now given you the option to just convert and display an excerpt of your book; you'll be able to display just a chapter or two without revealing the rest.

We long realized that there is no "one size fits all" when it comes to page conversion quality and resolutions. There is a tradeoff between quality and filesize. This is why in our current version (online) we have given you the  flexibility to choose between different resolutions, dimensions, and image compression ratios for the pages. This takes effect in the conversion process. As a user experience enhancement, you can now test an individual page, to see how effective your conversion settings are. View the converted page and see the resulting quality and file size.

We've added a few more design customization options especially for the thumbnail control.

Once you're finished going through all the options, it is time to export to one of the 4 formats: web files, Windows desktop application, Mac desktop application, or Android native app. We have added some export options for each format to choose from. For example, for web files, you have the option now to include an html5 alternative version of your ebook, in case the browser does not support flash (as in the case of iPhone or iPad).

In the case of Android export, you can add your unique package ID, or even reduce your app filesize by including your ebook page files into a separate remote data folder.

You can now optionally include a button control to share your ebook across over 12 different social networks. What would be better than having your readers share your ebook with other readers?

BookBake now will keep track of where your reader last stopped reading, and give him the option to resume from that stop, or read from the beginning.

Well, that's all. We're also doing a quick redesign of our homepage which will be visible soon. If you find some of those features unique, don't forget to share the article with others. We'll keep you updated!

BookBake Launch - Press Release

Check out our launch's press release!

BookBake is the freshest ebook creation software in the market, giving you the freedom to bake/create rich interactive multiplatform ebooks flavored with your own design and layout. It is as simple as adding a PDF document from your machine, choosing a template design, and making a few clicks to go through some special options. In a matter of seconds, your publication is ready in several formats: a browser-compatible ebook application, a Windows desktop application, a Macintosh desktop application, as well as a native Android app.

The software is not just useful for books, but any type of publication that require branding and customizations asked by your picky boss, such as magazines, reports, brochures, restaurant menus, etc. Upon the cool features that differentiates BookBake from the other ebook creators, is the ability to choose among different page transition effects, instead of having to stick with the overused “page-flipping” transition effect. They feature a nice zoom tool, that lets you draw a window on the page, to zoom this area only – useful for zooming into news article columns.

The payment model at BookBake is based on credits, their unit of currency for exporting ebooks. So the user pays just for what he needs – meaning he can create a multiplatform ebook for as low as $35 only. To additionally satisfy the big players (publishers, libraries, news agencies, etc) the people at BookBake is offering a subscription-based premium license for unlimited ebook credits, which is priced separately according to the license specs.
Started with a team of ebook enthusiasts, BookBake merged out of an initial service provided by the same guys since 2005: Flash-eBook. Similar to BookBake, with the primary difference of being a service instead of a standalone licensed product, Flash-eBook showed its outstanding efficiency with performance and filesize. By the end of 2011, the team planned to launch an affordable product, that can give the user the freedom of configuring the ebook behavior independently.

BookBake is a product of Vijua, a Cairo-based company specializing in ebook creation tools and services. Vijua helps major brands and agencies across the region create the best user experiences for their customers through their electronic publications. Vijua is also a leader in online/offline interactive media solutions.