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Take Control of iBooks Author
Plan, produce, and publish a Multi-Touch ebook for the iPad!
Although Apple's iBooks Author 2 is free, that doesn't mean it's also easy. In Take Control of iBooks Author, you'll join ebook designer and instructional software developer Michael E. Cohen as he helps you create a Multi-Touch ebook in iBooks Author 2.
You'll find friendly guidance with planning a project so that your workflow and outline fit what iBooks Author 2 can do. You'll also get comprehensive step-by-step instructions for how to produce your ebook by customizing layouts and arranging text and media. Finally, you'll learn how to publish your ebook, whether for distribution on Apple's iBookstore or elsewhere.
- More Info
- Contents & Intro
- What’s New
- FAQ
- Blog
Apple's Multi-Touch ebooks boast visually impressive, template-driven layouts that can contain many types of media—including interactive images, slideshows, audio and video files, rotating 3D images, scrolling sidebars, popping popovers, and quiz questions. You create them on your Mac in the free iBooks Author 2 from Apple, and you can sell them to iPad users in the iBookstore or distribute them for free in any way you like. (iBooks Author 2 runs on Mac OS X 10.7.4 Lion and later.)
Read this ebook for expert advice on how to:
Plan Your Project!
- Give your content a "spine," and design it to flow comfortably into an iBooks Author template.
- Determine what special types of media your book will contain—including audio files, video files, slideshows, charts and tables, graphics, interactive graphics, 3D rotating graphics (COLLADA), and study questions. You'll learn what your options are, and what file formats are needed.
- Decide whether to write your text in iBooks Author or in another program—and, if you decide to write outside of iBooks Author, learn how to import your content efficiently.
Produce Your Book!
- Pick an iBooks Author template and customize it—whether it’s one of the six new Portrait Only templates or a Landscape with Portrait template, you’ll get detailed advice for customizing it so your book looks right no matter which way you turn it.
- Add new chapters, sections, and pages to your book.
- Make your text flow through your book, and understand how to control the flow.
- Import and position graphics, videos, and other media items, so that they appear where you want them to—and understand why and how these elements may appear as thumbnails.
- Make an imported graphic interactive with tappable elements that reveal additional information.
- Create and configure study questions (and answers).
- Add an interactive glossary and index, and understand how they interact.
- Learn how iBooks Author generates a table of contents, and tweak your table of contents.
- Make internal hyperlinks and external links to the Web.
Publish!
- Export your ebook as a basic PDF or text file (for people who want to read your book, but don't have an iPad).
- Export your ebook as a Multi-Touch ebook that can be read exclusively in iBooks on the iPad.
- Get set up to make your ebook available through Apple's iBookstore.
- Upload your completed project to the iBookstore.
Book Info
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About the Author
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Book Reviews
Author Interviews
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Michael E. Cohen has taught English composition, worked as a programmer for NASA’s Deep Space Network, helped develop the first commercial ebooks at the Voyager Company, co-founded a major university’s Humanities computing center, taught a number of people, and played with a lot of new technology. He's the author of a number of books, including Take Control of PDFpen 6, Take Control of iBooks Author, and Take Control of TextExpander.
Table of Contents
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Read Me FirstThis book introduces you to iBooks Author, Apple’s software for creating and publishing what Apple calls “Multi-Touch books.” Although iBooks Author was specifically designed with textbook publishing in mind, Take Control of iBooks Author shows you how to conceive, plan, produce, and publish Multi-Touch books for a variety of uses and audiences. It was written by Michael E. Cohen, edited by Tonya Engst, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc. |
Introduction
Introduction from Version 1.0
Near the beginning of the final decade of the Twentieth Century, I found myself working at a small publishing company housed in a condemned building on the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica, California. I was part of a small group called the Expanded Books team, and our mission was to make the first mass market ebooks. To be sold on floppy disk. To be read on 5-pound computers with dim 640 by 400 resolution monochrome screens. We all wore black-and-white “Text: The Next Frontier” T-shirts, and we felt that we were inventing the future.
We were. In their heyday, the Voyager Expanded Books were award-winning hits and the talk of the publishing world. Voyager even wrote a toolkit so other publishers could produce Expanded Books. The possibilities seemed limitless for long-form digital text.
But by mid-decade it all went pear-shaped. Apple, which produced the software and hardware on which most Voyager products depended, began spiraling into a near-death experience, while at the same time a comet slamming into Jupiter helped propel the World Wide Web into world-wide popularity. Long-form, carefully designed ebooks were out, and short-form, loosely interconnected assemblages of Web pages were in. Ebooks survived, but just barely, a backwater of the publishing world that few observers regarded as being relevant.
Finally, some ten years later, Amazon’s Kindle re-ignited interest in ebook publishing, and the reborn-and-on-a-roll Apple introduced a device called an iPhone that redefined what a handheld device was. After that came the iPad and its iBooks app, and suddenly ebooks were hits again and the talk of the publishing world once more.
The irony was that the ebooks of 2010 were barely more advanced in terms of features and usability than were the original Expanded Books of fifteen years earlier. In some ways, they were even less advanced.
However, early in 2012, Apple introduced a digital book production tool, iBooks Author, and an ebook format that provided capabilities far beyond what the current standard ebook formats could provide. Although iBooks Author was specifically designed for producing textbooks, it became immediately clear to me that long-form digital text was finally moving beyond what the Expanded Books could do, and that the ebook future was looking bright again. I was excited and delighted.
Now the circle is complete: back in the days when ebooks were being born I wrote the user guide for the original Voyager Expanded Book Toolkit, and now, twenty years later, here I am writing a user guide for its Twenty-First Century descendent. Time for a new T-shirt:
Text: The Next Frontier Redux
One year later…
Since I wrote the preceding, Apple’s foray into interactive book publishing seems to be flourishing: a look at the “Made with iBooks Author” section of the iBookstore shows hundreds of books of various types and genres. At the same time, the number of devices capable of displaying Multi-Touch books created by iBooks Author has grown enormously; to date Apple has sold well over 100 million iPads, and the pace seems to be accelerating. Ebooks in general have completely disrupted the traditional publishing industry, and self-published books have become a force to be reckoned with.
With the release of iBooks Author 2, Apple has taken an already powerful and polished tool for making interactive ebooks and improved it significantly. Certainly, iBooks Author is not the only ebook game in town, and Apple’s iBookstore is not the only playground, but if you are at all interested in producing an interactive ebook, it’s become an even better place to start.
iBooks Author Quick Start
Take Control of iBooks Author is presented in the same sequence you would typically follow when creating an iBooks Author ebook. However, there is no harm, and often great benefit, to jumping around so that you can explore or inform yourself about a particular topic. Use this Quick Start as your roadmap to the ebook-production landscape.
Understand Textbooks:
- See What Is a Textbook? to find out what makes a textbook a textbook and how iBooks Author is designed with building them in mind.
- Learn How to Think about Your Book to understand the relationship between its main textual spine and its illustrative and interactive contents.
Plan Your Project:
- You not only should Assemble the Outline, but start to Collect Your Assets, making sure to Be on the Right Side of Rights.
- It doesn’t just happen; you have to Plan for Interactivity, using the widgets that iBooks Author provides.
Put It Together:
- To give your book a custom look, learn how to Adapt and Revise a Template, Customize the Opening, and Modify the Layouts. Then Save a Template so you can use it for other books.
- The text is the thing: understand how to Format and Flow text, Import Text, and decide if you want to Compose in the Shell.
Accessorize:
- Learn to Wrap so that text and non-text items can live together on the same page, and see why it helps to Lay Them Out like Widgets.
- Add Images, Shapes, Tables, and Charts to illustrate your text; Add Video and Audio to bring it to life, and then Add Interactive Presentations for the ultimate in reader participation.
- iPads can rotate and so can your book, so don’t forget to Flip It for a Different View.
- Add Study Questions (and Answers) to help your book’s readers remember what they’ve read, and Cross Reference Your Book to help them find their way around.
- You can give your readers additional information when you Create and Organize a Glossary with iBook Author’s Glossary feature. Bonus: you can also use it to Create Indexes. (Sound confusing? Not if you Learn How the Glossary Works.)
Expose Yourself:
- Before you let your book walk out the door, Fine-Tune the Table of Contents, Preview Your Book, and Make Advance Reading Copies.
- Finally, get down to business and Obtain an ISBN. Then, wrap it all up when you Set Up an iTunes Connect Account (If You Need One) and Prepare an iTunes Store Package (If You Need One).
What’s New in Version 1.1
This 1.1 version of Take Control of iBooks Author takes into account the changes and enhancements in iBooks Author 2.0 (see Apple’s Support document What’s new in iBooks Author 2.0). The most notable revisions in the ebook are these:
- In Import Text I added information about how to use section breaks in an imported document so that it imports as multiple chapters or sections, plus I now provide more details about importing from Pages or Word. I also added more help in Importing Tips.
- In Choose a Template, I have taken into account the expanded range of templates in iBooks Author 2.0 and discussed some of the specialized templates that are now included. In particular, I describe the new Portrait Only templates in Choose between Portrait and Landscape Templates. In addition, I now refer to the portrait view in the original landscape templates from iBooks Author 1 as the “alternate portrait view” to distinguish it from the Portrait Only template.
- Several options available when you Customize the Opening have changed. The removal of the audio option and the expansion of video formats for Intro Media is documented in Change the Intro Media. Change the Table of Contents now takes into account Portrait Only templates.
- iBooks Author 2 adds the ability to create new chapter, section, and page layouts; I talk about those in Modify the Layouts. iBooks Author 2 also subtly modifies how much you can customize the alternate portrait layouts in a Landscape with Portrait template: I discuss that in Change an Alternate Portrait Chapter Layout and Change a Section Layout.
- In Lay Them Out like Widgets, I describe the new Make Full Screen on Tap option for images, shapes, and other objects and how it affects the alternate portrait view.
- I point you to information about adding complex mathematical equations with MathML and LaTeX in By the Numbers.
- iBooks Author can now use any audio and video format that QuickTime supports in its Media widget, so I’ve removed information about converting media from Add Video and Audio, since iBooks Author now does that for you. I also describe the new presentation options for audio-only Media widgets in that section.
- Add Interactive Presentations now covers how to Add Scrolling Sidebars and Pop-Overs and updates the descriptions of the other widgets.
- The workflow for publishing books has been streamlined (see Prepare an iTunes Store Package), and a method of distributing books, Apple’s iTunes U, has become more open (see Consider iTunes U).
What versions of Mac OS X does iBooks Author work with?
iBooks Author works only with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion or above (including OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion) and is available only through the Mac App Store.
Can I read this ebook on an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or Kindle?
There are lots of great ways to read our ebooks on these devices. For more details, please read our latest Device Advice.
Ask a Question
Feel free to ask us if you have a question about this title!
Send Us Your Comments!
How could we not publish such kind words? If you'd like to send us your comments (good or bad, though we hope they're all good), just click the Feedback link on the cover of your copy of the ebook. Be sure to let us know if we can publish your comment. Thanks!
Update Plans
March 28, 2013 -- Now that we've released version 1.1 of this ebook, which covers version 2.0 of iBooks Author, we have no particular plans to update the ebook once again. Although we had fun exploring the nooks and crannies of iBooks Author, we may (or may not) choose to travel this path again should Apple release another big new version of iBooks Author.
—Adam Engst
Ebooks, Footnotes, and Skeuomorphs, Oh my!
June 5, 2013 --
If you’ve been wondering about the place of traditional footnotes in a Multi-Touch book, you might find this article on TidBITS, "Ebooks, Footnotes, and Skeuomorphs, Oh My!," 4 June 2013, of some interest.
—Michael E. Cohen
Michael in Your Pocket (Sized Podcast)
April 19, 2013 --
Michael chatted with Scott Willsey and Peter Nikolaidis of Pocket Sized Podcast about iBooks Author and how best to approach using it last week, and a good time was had by all. The interview begins about 8 minutes into the show.
—Michael E. Cohen
MacVoices Talks with Michael about iBooks Author
April 4, 2013 --
Within hours of completing the 1.1 version of Take Control of iBooks Author, Michael virtually met up with Chuck Joiner to talk about what is new with the iBooks Author software, how Apple is progressing with its Multi-Touch textbook initiative, and where interactive text seems to be going. Hear or watch the interview on MacVoices.
—Michael E. Cohen
Michael E. Cohen, the Back Story
August 3, 2012 --
Although many Mac writers could have written Take Control of iBooks Author, Michael was my first pick because of his extensive experience with the digital book genre. TUAW has published an interview with Michael in which he talks about his prior experiences at the Voyager Company and brings them into context by looking at what he likes (and doesn't like) about iBooks Author.
—Tonya Engst
In Which Michael and Chuck Discuss Ebooks, Education, and iBooks Author
May 31, 2012 --
Watch (or listen) as Chuck Joiner and I spend 40 minutes discussing Take Control of iBooks Author, its related ebook, Take Control of Getting Ready for iBooks Author, and the long, winding road from ebooks on floppy disk to today's interactive Multi-Touch books.
—Michael E. Cohen
Getting the Book Invented Properly
May 27, 2012 --
Coincidentally, the day after Take Control of iBooks Author was released, The Literary Platform, a site that showcases projects experimenting with literature and technology, announced the winner of its Douglas Adams Animation competition. Entries in that competition had to provide animation for an audio track that Douglas Adams recorded in the early 1990s to promote the Voyager Expanded Books. A crunchy-sounding 8-bit-audio recording, in fact. The recording used for the competition’s winning entry has had a musical background added; you can find my personal copy of the original recording (converted to AAC audio) here.
—Michael E. Cohen
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