Well, I’d be bragging that Amazon has listened to my gripes, but I don’t think I’ve been griping about this one long enough to be its inspiration. Amazon now has a app called Kindle Kid’s Book creator that lets you create picture books for kids without paying an expensive third-party or learning to code.
amazon.com/gp/feature.html? … 921&ref_=2
Don’t get your hopes up for interactivity though. Apparently the only such feature is trivial, text pop-up. More may come later.
Here’s more details:
Note that it doesn’t work with epaper Kindles, just the Kindle Fire and the apps for tablets and smartphones. And you can’t export it to work with other ebook platforms.
The good news is that it’s a native Mac app rather than a dreadful Java app like the Kindle Previewer. Yeah! I hate Java apps.
A quick glance suggests the app name is right. It is for a child’s simple picture story book and not useful for many other purposes. Apple iBooks Author is for high school and college textbooks. This really is for kid’s story books. Someone needs to create a Scrivener type app that’s for basic text like novels.
The bad news is that it still has the flaws all such ebook creation apps have. You cannot upload a book to Amazon from within the app. You must save a file and go through webpages.
Feel free to down load and review it. I’d be especially interested in discovering if it could be kludged, so kids could create their own story books and share them with friends, bypassing Amazon and the sometimes dangerous world of making your kids visible to the public.
–Michael W. Perry, co-author of Lily’s Ride