Creating Ebooks With iBooks Author

Last Thursday (January 19th, 2012), Apple held Thursday’s education event at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum and unveil its new products focusing on education. Those products include iBooks Author, iBooks 2, and iTunes U applications for the iPhone and iPad. iBooks Author allows you to create books including textbooks through Mac, while iBooks 2 is an application to read those textbooks in iPad. Lastly, iTunes U helps the teachers manage class activities. Satisfying your curiosity, first of all here is a brief explanation of iBooks Author.

iBooks Author is an application for Mac that allows you to create an interactive multi-touch books with interactive contents for iPad. You can start creating books on iBooks Author by choosing one of the templates provided. Next, click and drag upon your own media such as images, videos, audios, texts, as well as 3D models and other interactive media to your book. Adding text is very easy as it supports Microsoft Word format. Drop the Word document onto the chapter and it will atomically create sections, headers and page layout. Furthermore, iBooks Author supports keynote presentations that can be embedded directly, allowing you to have sideshows within the book. Just drop the keynote presentation to your book and it will be automatically turned into an interactive widget. You may custom your own widget if you have knowledge on JavaScript and HTML. Using slideshows within the books is very helpful for teachers who want to have own courseware and customize content.

iBooks Author

Another feature of iBooks Author is easy glossary creation as well as making link to your own glossary definition terms. The glossary may include interactive media and even JavaScript and HTML5 code. When your book is completed, you can preview it directly to your iPad by connecting your iPad to Mac via WiFi network or USB cable. It is really helpful yet amazing to be able to get immediate feedback about whether the book turns out to the way you are expecting to or not.

When all is completed and you finished create the book then the next step is publish the book. You needn’t to worry as iBooks Author will help you submit the book to iBookstore – either for purchase or free download. One thing to be considered if you publish it to iBookstore is that all books including textbook is having a 2 GB file size limit. It means that you can only publish book with maximum 2 GB size in iBookstore. You may also publish it for free download to your own website or publisher’s website. Publishing your book outside iBookstore, you have to export it first and then convert them in PDF, text, or iBooks document formats. For all purchase books in iBookstore, as usual Apple will take 30 percent cut from the books price. Publishers are allowed to set their own prices, but textbooks prices have to be set under $14.99. Apple iBooks Author has already available to be downloaded for free via Mac App Store.