Quick Thoughts | on using iBooks Author over the weekend
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 10:23 AM 
I’ve spent a couple of hours with iBooks Author over the last couple of days and I’m impressed. Mainly because the timing is perfect. For a few months now I’d been trying various solutions to do exactly what this application does: create a photo book that looks good on the iPad. Needless to say nothing was really cutting it and I had all but resigned myself to using PDF — nothing wrong with that but I‘d hoped for something more immersive and directly compatible with the iBookstore.
And here we are.
iBooks Author does exactly what I want but it IS a 1.0 release, with all the baggage it entails. A few annoyances:
- Pages can’t be re-ordered (chapters can).
- You can’t save individual layouts or duplicate pages (again, you can only duplicate chapters).
- Zoom factor resets every time you switch chapters.
- You can’t scroll through an entire book but can only view one chapter at a time.
The recurring theme here is that chapters are building block 0, the base object and the only level on which you have any form of control. I’d like to see individual pages behave the same way, as we’re accustomed to seeing in iWork on which this app is obviously based.
I was also struggling with the way chapters appear on the iPad. Until I realized you set this view in the TOC section, not on the main chapter page. Perhaps reading the manual would’ve helped here (!).
That said, I get a definite kick out of seeing the results on the iPad. I’ve been waiting so long for this. Tethering works perfectly: plug in your iPad, open iBooks and hit Preview in IBA. It creates a book with a Proof banner across its cover. Anytime you hit Preview again it simply uploads the changes to that same file. Sleek.
So what am I preparing? A photo book entitled One Solitude, based on a cross-country trip I took two years ago to chase away ghosts of a looming depression.
I’ll keep you posted.
Addendum
I want to reiterate my stance on the legal hoopla we’ve been seeing since IBA was released. Apple doesn’t own the content. It doesn’t own the copyright. iBooks Author is a free tool provided by Apple to create iBooks. Not ebooks. They’re giving away an iBook creation kit that creates iPad-compatible books. This doesn’t exclude porting that same content, which we own, to another format. Not at all. This is just AN ADDITIONAL outlet for the content we create. In software terms: a new platform.
So this whole evil meme is absolute nonsense. Wait… Apple and naysayers? Who’da thought.
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Reader Comments (4)
Again I find myself agreeing with you on all counts. I also can't wait for an update. One to add to your list are interactive images, they can't be re-arranged in their assigned box. There would be no need to rearrange them if importing them automatically centred them; they always appear off centre! I have those pages in the book set up as placeholders until Apple fixes that bug.
Haven't integrated widgets in my layout yet so I haven't seen that one. Definitely a 1.0 release. The good news: this is Apple's usual MO. I'm betting we'll see a .1 update that fixes a bunch of things sooner than later.
Excellents thanks for the heads up. It just so happens I've been brainstorming how to do a book as well and now Apple comes in to the rescue, very neat tool. Just hopes it has an update soon.
Thanks Jorge, I haven't had time to dive deeper into the software since that first brush with it but I'm looking forward to it. What's interesting is how it forces certain questions and choices that go beyond what we traditionally think of as a "book".
It can be easy to go overboard with a lot of glitz but I think the challenge will lie with finding the right dosage of "immersion".