At long last, the search is over (again). I had just about resigned myself to paying several thousand dollars to the original coders of the beautiful Noble Beast release – Steampunk Holmes – to have them update their native app. But then two months went by without so much as an estimate, and I began to fear for the whole project (again).

So I went back to the intertubes to check if any scrappy upstart had emerged in the year since I’d last searched for buried treasure in that weird, nameless, nebulous sandbox where Statisticity plays.

It didn’t take long to find Beneath the Ink, a publishing startup in the enhanced e-book space. Like Noble Beast, they were one of the 2014 Digital Book Award winners (they won for best Adult Fiction – Enhanced Ebook, where Noble Beast won for best Adult Fiction – App). I have no idea how prestigious this award might be, but at the very least it hints at a finished product and some sort of independent review.

I contacted Beneath the Ink through their website, and they responded quickly and enthusiastically. Since then, I’ve had the chance to test-drive one of their finished books as well as their just-released author portal. I’m happy to report that – besides a great name – Beneath the Ink has powerful software. I’ll be able to keep pretty much every feature I wanted in the native app. That means character profiles, illustrations, additional scenes, images, wikis, and more. Beyond that, the author portal is so intuitive and user-friendly that I’ll be able to do most of the technical production work myself, despite being a code-tard. And where the Noble Beast version would only have been accessible on the iPad, Beneath the Ink will also run on any device that can host the epub2 or epub3 formats – including current versions of Kindle, iBook, Kobo, and Nook.

Finally, this upstart is still around and growing fast, which may suggest a better business model as well. At any rate, I’m cautiously optimistic that they’ll be around long enough for Statisticity to see the light…