Matt MacInnis has an ax to grind with a certain digital publishing giant, and he isn’t trying to hide it.

The founder and chief executive of the digital book company Inkling calls Amazon’s e-books “glorified $10 text files.”

While he acknowledges Amazon’s place in popularizing e-books, he also believes the company has been holding back digital publishing for years. Now, after helping to popularize digital textbooks and digital travel guides, MacInnis thinks he finally has the tools to make Inkling a threat to Amazon.

Today the company is announcing Inkling Habitat, a cloud-based collaborative publishing environment that lets anyone make professional-looking digital books.

“We’ve been working over the last three years on a whole set of problems to move the industry forward. … Looking at the current model that exists today [the Amazon model] is cringe inducing,” MacInnis told VentureBeat in an interview on Monday.

With Inkling Habitat and the recently-launched Inkling Content Discovery Platform, which allows search engines to index entire digital books and lead consumers to purchase them, the company aims to show publishers how they could be better off outside of Amazon’s walled garden. (Amazon’s Kindle books aren’t indexable by Google and other search engines, which makes them practically invisible.)

The announcement comes only a few hours after competitor Kno announced a new product to turn PDFs into interactive e-books.

It makes sense for the CEO of a digital publishing company to view Amazon as a rival, but MacInnis’s tone now feels far more aggressive than in the past — perhaps born out of confidence. He tells me that he’s “blown away” by the results of Inkling’s Content Discovery Platform.

“The conversion rate is so good we’re scared it’s not real,” MacInnis said. “We’re basically killing the traditional model of conversion rates. … Publishers love it since it give them an end-run around Amazon, and people love it since they can search for content on Google like they do every day.”

Now with Inkling Habitat, even more publishers will be able to create professional-quality digital books on Inkling’s platform. Most important, they will also be able to reap the benefits of the insane conversion rates the company is seeing via Google. So far, all of Inkling’s publishing partners have approved Google’s indexing, except for the higher-ed publisher Pearson.

Feature-wise, Habitat lets publishers collaborate on a digital book from anywhere in the world, it lets them integrate a wide variety of media, and it also lets them easily publish to multiple platforms with a single click. While digital publishing software like iBooks has remained fairly traditional — with all of its files sitting on your desktop, and most of the creation work left up to a single person — Habitat is built for a more modern publishing environment that’s collaborative and readily accessible anywhere.

So what took so long for Inkling to allow search engines to index its wares? MacInnis explained that the company has actually been working on it for years, but there were five big reasons it was difficult:

1. Inkling needed to have a secure web reader (which launched last year).
2. It needed to let people access content without logging in.
3. Inkling needed to offer structured content, and not just have the books appear as a bag of words.
4. It needed to be able to sell the content in parts — for example, chapters or portions of books, as well as the entire book.
5. Finally, Inkling had to have the contracts and digital publishing rights in place to make such a deal with Google.

Almost four years since Inkling’s launch in 2009, the company finally had all the pieces in place to open up its content and fully realize the potential of its platform.

San Francisco, Calif-based Inkling has raised a round of $17 million in 2011 from Tenaya Capital, Jafco Ventures, Pearson Education, and Sequoia Capital.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Inkling’s digital publication platform helped textbook makers move to the iPad. Now, the company is setting its sights on travel with the launch of Frommer’s Day by Day travel guides for the iPad and iPhone.

Travel has traditionally been one of the lowest performing digital content segments, Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis told VentureBeat in an interview yesterday. That’s because many consumers would rather grab a traditional paper travel guide, which they can dog-ear and bookmark as much as they need to, rather than a digital guide that’s harder to navigate (and requires a device that’s more tempting to steal).

Using Inkling’s platform — which allows you to search, bookmark, and navigate through digital content easily — and Frommer’s rich travel information, the new Day by Day books end up being far more useful than a mere paperback. The new Frommer’s digital books also marks the first time Inkling has brought its platform to the iPhone, giving you instant access to all of the content of the iPad version on the go. (An update in a few weeks will add log-in capabilities, which will let you synchronize data between the iPad and iPhone apps.)

The Day by Day digital books retail between $10 and $15, and are available as individual apps and within Inkling’s app. They’re also universal binaries, so you can purchase them once to use them on both your iPhone and iPad. They contain over 650 maps and more than 2,000 Retina Display-ready photos, which makes it easy to plan upcoming trips on the new iPad.

The apps contain both indoor maps for locations like museums, as well as outdoor maps that point to interesting destinations in their respective locations. The maps are entirely local, so you don’t need to worry about having cellular data to view them. The maps don’t take advantage of GPS functionality, because travel maps typically aren’t made to scale, MacInnis said. But Inkling is working on a way to implement accurate GPS within the apps down the line.

In addition to creating notes just for yourself, you can also make them public, which adds an intriguing crowdsourcing element. It brings some of the interesting social elements from sites like TripAdvisor on top of Frommer’s professional travel guide data. Authors can also make their own notes within the digital books.

MacInnis tells me that he used France Day by Day app to plan his honeymoon, and he was particularly surprised by how useful the high-res iPad images were for deciding on which locations to visit.

Looking beyond textbooks and travel, MacInnis says he’s excited to bring O’Reilly’s books to the Inkling platform, starting with the Missing Manual series. He said that readers can expect cool functionality from the digital books. “Why read about Javascript, when you can just run it from within the book,” he said.

San Francisco, Calif-based Inkling was founded in 2009, and raised a round of $17 million last summer from Tenaya Capital, Jafco Ventures, Pearson Education, and Sequoia Capital.