Announcing my simultaneous first steps into the worlds of e-books and self-publishing. I’m pretty excited. If you’re an iPad user who likes FoxTrot or who has a kid who likes FoxTrot, these are for you. (And if you’re a Kindle, Nook, or Android tablet user, please don’t hate me...your day will come!)

I’m calling them FoxTrot Pad Packs, because I like the metaphor of collectable cards and how you build up your collection via booster packs. I made them myself using Apple’s free iBooks Author software. Each $1.99 book contains 100 strips, some old, some new, some story lines, some stand-alone jokes, some black and white dailies, some color Sundays. The idea is to create mini books that take maybe 20-30 minutes to read and which aren’t bogged down with a ton of outdated references, as happens with my older, chronologically arranged print books. Plus, they’re short enough that I can put together a fun themed book like the geeky #3.14. They’re at native resolution for the new iPad with its Retina display, but look awesome on older iPads as well. The navigation is super smooth and you can scroll through thumbnails and bookmark favorites if you like. And you can pinch zoom for extra detail if you want. I’m really, really happy with how well they turned out.

My hope is to release new ones every couple of months or so. Assuming people like these first ones. This is all a big experiment for me.

Here are links to the first three books available now on iTunes:

Pad Pack #1
Pad Pack #2
Pad Pack #3.14 - Extra Geeky Edition