iBooks Author was launched at an Apple press event at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. This new Mac OS X application can be used to create any kind of book, but Apple has focused in heavily on textbooks and has already partnered with academic publishers McGraw-Hill and Pearson, who have content ready in this new format. Books created with iBooks Author can be viewed in the iBooks 2 application.
So what exactly is iBooks Author and what can it do? Its features are designed to help bring highly illustrated and complex layout books to life in a digital format. Anyone who has used Apple’s excellent presentation software Keynote or products such as Adobe InDesign will feel comfortable with the user interface of iBooks Author. Some of the key features include:
Ø A selection of page layout templates to help get you started, or you can design your own
Ø Add text, shapes, charts, tables, and Multi-Touch widgets anywhere on the page with a single click
Ø Mask images, use alignment guides — even add reflections and shadows
Ø Add a variety of widgets such as: interactive images, interactive galleries of images, 3D images, video & audio, questions/reviews (multiple choice, chose correct image, label the image, or a mixture)
Ø Widgets can also be custom written for an iBook using code in Javascript and HTML
Ø iBooks Author also simplifies creating glossaries for a title. Simply highlight a word and click a button, and the word is added to a glossary, while definitions for words can also be simply added
Ø Accessibility: The table of contents, glossary, widgets, main text, and more are built to automatically take advantage of VoiceOver technology
Once your book is complete iBooks Author helps you submit it to the iBookstore for purchase or free download. You can also export it in iBook format to share on iTunes U. The iBooks Author application is designed to run on Apple Macintosh computers and is available free on the Mac App Store.
When initially launched the iBooks Author EULA (end user license agreement) raised concerns over ownership of works created. Apple has made changes to the slightly murky legal wording and now it can be summarised as follows:
Ø Publisher/creator owns the content created in iBooks Author and can export it into PDF, etc
Ø Apple takes 30% share of any content created in iBooks Author and sold in iBookstore
Ø iBooks Author files (i.e. finished work created with iBooks Author) can only be sold in the iBookstore (currently this is the only technical option as iBooks Author uses a proprietary version of ePub)
Despite being an Apple only technology, iBooks Author presents an exciting range of opportunities for publishers with highly illustrated or complex layout content with the ability for additional content and/or functionality to be added.
