Motionbooks

Intro To LifePlanning

A Slightly Long Explanation … But It Eases The Pain

After creating several titles based on our own mediabook format (MBooks), we faced an unpleasant reality when Apple introduced iPad. Online digital booksellers distribute products based on format-standards, often their own. This is okay if you’re selling books developed for .epub or .mobi. We weren’t. MBooks were based on blended narrative — video, audio, text and animation – wrapped together in custom-program. No matter how worthy our years of research and programming, we had to adopt a new standard. The only format even close to what we’d been doing was the just-announced Blio standard, from K-NFB.

Since Blio and its authoring requirements were unknown in the beginning, the only option was to spend the time wisely, breaking out media-assets from our MBooks products as we awaited the specifics of a new “wrapper.” This was when we did a crash-dive into “scribing,” also described as “white-boarding on steroids.”

We’d actually been doing a form of scribing for years. But it was geezer-scribing. Slow-paced and cheap in terms of effort. A funky little illustration here, maybe; a ten-frame animation, there. Inevitably, the graphical style was coarse and fairly screamed “the author is seriously lazy.”

What changed was seeing some of the stunning white-board work from RSA-Animate.

Since we were already retooling the files rather extensively, we decided to refry the new editions in the style of info-scribing.

Introduction to LifePlanning is actually the test footage from our first effort at resetting the content. Excerpted from a religious production that runs approximately 30-minutes, we’re generally happy with the new direction. The information scales perfectly to today’s “media-mind,” and conveys highly resolved content … to any age-group. That was our goal all along.

After dead-tree books, what happens next? Click on Introduction to LifePlanning and maybe you’ll see what’s next.