Creating Autographed e-books with the iPad

I’ve personally never had an autographed book but always wanted one. It seems as the world is switching from physical books to ebooks autographed copies are going to be a thing of the past. In digital form an autograph isn’t something unique.

I was intrigued when I came across this post from Matt Gemmell on how he is doing autographs with his iPad.

Because I self-publish and thus generate the ebooks myself, I have full control of the process. My iPad Pro with Apple Pencil is the idea tool for not only inscribing and signing book covers in an efficient (and eco-friendly!) way, but also actually building and delivering the resulting beautiful personalised digital novel.

First, I have to do the actual signing. I use the Apple Pencil for this, and the regular Photos app. I have an album that contains just the clean cover art for each book, and when I get an order, I duplicate the relevant cover. Then I open the Markup interface to actually sign it.

He also personalizes each autograph copy with a message so it is unique which in my opinion makes it worth while. It wouldn’t make since to only autograph in this format.

While on the subjects of ebooks I’m still amazed at still how bad the tooling is to generate all the formats. Even in this’d post Matt says he can export to ePub but then has to switch to a separate desktop app to generate the Kindle format. Makes me really wish they would have all agreed on a standard like HTML is to the web.