The Associated Press announced Wednesday that its bible of style, The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, is now an e-book.
At more than 5,000 entries, the 2015 AP Stylebook is the biggest edition in its more than six decades of publication. The e-book makes it faster and easier to find a relevant style rule. Now journalists, students, public relations professionals and other writers and editors will have style guidance at the ready at all times.
Users have asked for an e-book version of the stylebook for years, said Stylebook Product Manager Colleen Newvine, “and those requests continued even after we mobile-optimized Stylebook Online back in 2012.”
Readers were already able to interact with the stylebook via the Web or through an app. So how’s the e-book experience different?
“It’s a purpose-built e-book,” Newvine said. With a clean design and internal linking throughout the book, “the e-book feels like it’s intended to be an e-book.”
It’s similar to the Web experience, which requires a subscription, but it’s native to the e-book platform, Newvine said.
“They’re very much siblings in that you can search and browse and link, but I guess the main difference is: What’s your preference as a user?” Newvine asked. “Do you like a phone browser experience, do you like an app experience, or do you like an e-book experience?”
Newvine worked with Peter Costanzo, a digital publishing specialist at the AP, on the project.
“He took the lead in working with developers to make sure features and functions were there and appropriate for each platform,” she said. “He understands, for example, that the way you build something for Kindle is different from the way you build it for iBooks.”
The price of the e-book also depends on the platform. It currently costs anywhere from $9.99 to $11.99. The next edition will come out with the print edition in the spring.
Related: Poynter’s News University has a course called Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More.
Correction: An earlier version of this story quoted a press release as saying that the Stylebook has more than 3,000 entries. It actually has more than 5,000 entries. It has been corrected.
