iBooks Author launch
Back in January 19th 2012, Apple had a special event. The topic was Education, where Apple released iBooks 2, and a new category in the iBookstore for Textbooks. Let’s take a quick look at iBooks Author.
iBA in a nutshell
Apple describes iBA as a tool for «educators and smaller publishers to create their own books”. You can only sell these books through the iBooks Store if they are accepted by Apple, but if you’re planning on distributing them for free, then you can do it from other places like your website.
This eBook authoring application is a free download, but you can only use it on a Mac.
A quick look
The iBooks Author app is very easy to use, mostly because you can easily drag and drop your content. You can build your interactive eBook without writing a single line of code using in a simple WISIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) interface. You can add text, images, charts, tables, and HTML code, among other things. If you’re familiar with Keynote or Pages, iBooks Author will feel very familiar.
iBooks Author comes preloaded with widgets like:
- Image Gallery. Just drag and drop more than one image into this widget, and it automatically creates a beautiful looking gallery.
- 3D objects. You can add even more interactivity with these types of objects.
- Media. Insert audio and video files.
- Pop-over. With this widget, we can add the function to tap on a word or image and a window pops up with more information.
- Slide bar. When we don’t have enough space in our page, this widget helps us a lot by adding more text or images into it.
- HTML. This is my favorite one by far because you can don basically anything you can imagine.
These are just a few of them, we are going to see each one of them in depth in other articles.
Menu bars
You can edit most of your eBook from these 3 main bars to add or remove pages, chapters, tables, objects, and the list goes on; plus you can also edit them using the Inspector.
1. The bar on the left side where you can find editing tools for the pages, sections, chapters, cover, intro media, table of contents and the glossary.
2. The upper bar where you can find View, Orientation, Text Box, Table, Charts, Widgets, Preview, and Publish.
3. The inspector. This is very important because you can manage a lot of parameters from the inspector, if you’re already familiar with Pages or Keynote, then iBA will feel very familiar.
So, if you want to build an interactive eBook, and haven’t tried iBooks Author, I recommend it 100% for its ease of use, in addition to its huge potential to create an awesome eBook.
This is just a quick look at iBooks Author, but if you want to learn more, check out my other articles related to iBA and the resources to build an amazing eBook.
