At Tumult, we’ve supported digital book creators for years. In 2012 we built in support for embedding Hype content in the new iBooks Author tool created by Apple. This empowered storytellers to embed rich HTML content and animations in their books and distribute them globally. While Hype animators don’t always tell us what they’re working on, we began seeing incredible animated books like Noa’s Stars by Somoiso and The Slightly Annoying Elephant by David Williams & illustrated by Tony Ross. There’s several more examples on this page of iBook examples, this post featuring animators and graphic artists and many more in our gallery.

iBooks Author was particularly empowering to animators, writers, and artists creating stories and animations because it was so easy to create great looking content without the complexity of digital publishing workflows and overly-complex layout tools. Looking back on this time we’re happy to have helped so many creative people achieve their visions. But there’s some big changes coming with iBooks Author: the book-creation tools are moving to Pages in Apple’s ecosystem:

In many ways this is great. Pages is even more powerful than iBooks Author and has enormous benefits for creating Epubs and iBooks. But it’s also not so great: Pages does not at this time support any HTML content, so Hype animations won’t work in it unless you export your animations as a non-interactive video.

We were pleased to come across a powerful book creation tool where HTML5 content (and Hype exports) are supported called PubCoder. Getting your Hype exports into PubCoder is very easy, and exporting to an iBook or Epub is a one-button process. We wrote a guide for getting your Hype content into PubCoder, and our new friends at PubCoder also published a guide. We’re looking forward to see what you create!

Thanks to Trevor Young of Tapocketa Studio for introducing us to PubCoder. Read his guest post on his Welcome to Tallowmere project.

Related: Guide to importing Hype content in InDesign for Book Creation.