If you are involved in non-fiction books, Inkling Habitat is a major innovation that can change the way you work.

It enables teams to collaborate to produce eBooks that contain text, video, images, etc. When the book is complete, it can be output to epub and epub3 for use on all major e-reading platforms (Kindle, iPad, etc.) Pages resize the elements they contain depending on the screen on which they are being viewed, so that the book looks good on a desktop computer, a smartphone, a tablet, etc.

Habitat is seeking to make Google its content discovery platform, so that authors have an alternative to Amazon if they so desire.  Healthy competition is good for everybody, so in my opinion this is a plus.

Inkling titles are structured into logical chunks. Rather than “ebook” files with long strings of text, Inkling titles have “cards” for each topic in a chapter. Search engines can read those cards one-by-one and offer them up to search users.

Instead of a product information page for a book, searchers will end up right inside the content at the exact location most relevant to them. It’s the most sophisticated approach to the problem of discovery yet.

At the same time, Habitat ebooks can be published via Amazon.

Inkling Habitat is standards-based. The content you’ll build is HTML5, and Habitat lets you instantly build your content to fully standards-compliant EPUB 3. Publish your content to the Inkling Store and then bring it wherever you’d like, including iBooks and Kindle, royalty-free. (Yes, we’re serious.)

This appears to be a significant evolutionary advance in the ebook and self-publishing industry.