Michael Ashley

It seems the more time you spend dreaming up ideas for companies and products, the less time you have for family and friends... so I'm taking a short break from this blog—and dedicating more time to my loved ones. Believe me, this is a good thing. It's difficult to cut things out of your life, but it's like trimming a fruit tree, or weeding a garden—your efforts are well rewarded. And so it is, I'm signing off for now and will return when time permits... Hopefully, I'll have some great news to share when I do. --Mash

Apple introduced a fixed-layout feature for the iPad and iPhone that makes it possible to reproduce beautiful, full-page illustrated childrens books. For months they kept it secret while testing the new layouts. But now they've given us access to the format and we have started the process of making FastPencil compatible with these new full-bleed childrens books. Today, I'm happy to announce we've updated our system to support the new format on the Apple iPad for iBooks. There are a few extra steps necessary to get our default EPUB file ready for this format, but we can make the changes for you after publishing upon your request. If you have an illustrated childrens book that you would like to distribute through the iPad and the Apple iBookstore follow these steps and we can get your book uploaded in a snap: 1. Export each page in your book as a JPG image, no larger than 1476x1970pixels. Use JPG compression of 85. 2. Make sure your images are in order from first to