Inkling, maker of the leading publishing platform for high-quality digital content, today publicly released Inkling Habitat, a free, collaborative digital publishing environment designed for professionals. Paired with the recently launched Inkling Content Discovery Platform, which enables unparalleled online discovery for nonfiction book content, Inkling now provides the only end-to-end solution for publishers to build, market, and distribute high quality digital books at scale.

“For the last five years, the digital book market has been dominated by a single player. Products have been limited to 10-dollar text files, but there is another massive market for illustrated books, from textbooks to travel books, cooking, hobbies, medicine, and more, that demands the media-rich, interactive experience that mobile devices were built for,” said Matt MacInnis, Founder and CEO of Inkling. “Today we’re announcing a powerful new way for publishers to create beautiful, media-rich books, while also making it easier for customers to find and buy them.”

Inkling Habitat: The first collaborative digital publishing environment for professionals

Using Inkling Habitat, publishers will finally have the tools to build high-quality digital content they can be proud of. With Habitat, publishers can:

• Collaborate seamlessly from anywhere in the world: Fully cloud-based, Habitat lets teams of editors, developers, and designers from New York to New Delhi communicate, collaborate, and coordinate in real time, from first edit to final publish.
• Build delightful interactive content experiences: Publishers can integrate multimedia and enhanced content, including images, audio, and video, into both existing and digital-first books. For readers, the experience is as gorgeous as it is intuitive.
• Publish to multiple platforms with one click: Content can be published to multiple platforms with automatic formatting for any screen size. Plus, publishers can even export titles to standards-compliant EPUB for distribution across third-party channels.

Inkling Content Discovery Platform: Search is the new storefront

Inkling’s Content Discovery Platform (“CDP”) unlocks book content so that it can be indexed by search engines like Google and read by users when searching for relevant topics.

• Discovery and sharing anywhere: 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 buy the book content they are looking for. After a limited number of views per book, readers are prompted to purchase either a chapter or the entire book.
• New revenue opportunities: From individual title and chapter sales in the Inkling Store to single-title apps in the App Store, or standards-compliant EPUB export for third-party distribution, opportunities for incremental revenue are unlimited.

Strong Partner Momentum in Consumer, Professional, and Academic Markets

Already, more than two dozen existing publishing partners call Inkling home, including McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Wolters Kluwer, Elsevier, and Wiley, and popular brands like Frommer's, For Dummies, Kaplan Test Prep, and O'Reilly, who have already had their content built using pre-release versions of Habitat.

Today, Inkling announced that one of the largest publishers in the world, Pearson, has committed to integrating Habitat within its existing infrastructure and vendor network to power their next generation content and assessment products.

Also today, Inkling is announcing four new publishers bringing books to the platform:

• DK Publishing
• HarperCollins
• Lonely Planet
• Rick Steves

Inkling today also announced support for Creative Commons licenses in Habitat, which enables users to publish open content, including open educational resources, and distribute it free with a single click.

In addition, Inkling announced a partnership with the 20 Million Minds Foundation to build and distribute 50 open textbooks to serve California’s bill SB 1052, which provides for the development of more affordable open educational resources for college students. The first three titles will be available this spring, with more to follow into the fall.

Private Launch Event and Tools of Change Announcement

On Monday evening, February 11, MacInnis shared this announcement at a private invitation-only event with more than 400 publishing industry leaders, executives, and partners at Jazz at the Lincoln Center in New York City.

On Wednesday morning, February 13, MacInnis will deliver a keynote speech at the annual O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference in New York City to share his vision for the future of publishing with attendees. More information about MacInnis at the TOC Conference is available here.

About Inkling

Inkling is reinventing publishing in the era of mobile, and we've started by redefining the book. The world's leading publishers are bringing their best content to Inkling as engaging and interactive reading experiences. But it's about more than just a book. Look between the lines, and you’ll see a revolution in publishing: a new platform for creating, distributing and consuming media-rich, interactive content. Based in San Francisco, Inkling is backed by leading investors and partners with the world's leading publishers. For more information, visit www.inkling.com or www.inkling.com/habitat.