Californian e-book highlights 'Unbeaten' season

The Bakersfield Californian has just released "Unbeaten," its third e-book this year, an iPad-only celebration of Bakersfield High School's unbeaten 2011 football season. 

The Drillers' 13-0 season was the latest in a long string of titles for the state's most consistently successful prep-football program. 

Louis Amestoy, The Californian's Digital Convergence Manager, used Apple's iBooks Author program to produce the 150-page book that's stuffed with multimedia by repackaging a variety of staff-produced stories and photos with video highlights recorded Game-by-game summaries include detailed stats. by BHS staff. 

All told, "Unbeaten" includes:

• 132 photos, most never-before-published.
• 41 videos of game highlights. 
• Game stories, stats and  Californian prep reporter Zach Ewing's richly reported live-blog posts.
• Features on head coach Paul Golla and Drillers legend Frank Gifford, and more.

The 41 videos feature key plays from throughout the season.And all this for only $3.99 in the iBookstore. 

"Unbeaten" is a great keepsake for anyone with ties to BHS, who loves football or simply is interested in self-publishing multimedia books. We're experimenting with these kinds of "enhanced" e-books at The Californian because we see a market for quality multimedia content that takes advantage of ever-popular platforms like the iPad. The ability to view photo galleries, audio and video from within a digital book just gives the topic an Photo galleries can be packaged in a tidy viewer; a tap of the finger on the images will trigger full-screen views.added layer of enjoyment. 

Because of the heavy focus on video, we don't have any plans to release versions of "Unbeaten" for other e-reader platforms like the Kindle and Nook, both of which have restricted multimedia capabilities.

"Unbeaten" is the latest in The Californian's series of e-books. "March Meet: Bakersfield's Love Affair With Speed, Nitro & Good Times" and "Being Basque in Bakersfield" were released earlier this year. Coming soon is "The Great Quakes of 1952," a look at the We dug up some cool file images to illustrate a feature on Frank Gifford, the school's most famous alumnus.two massive quakes that shook Bakersfield and Tehachapi 60 years ago.