by Are digital interactive textbooks and the means to create them finally here?
Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and even Apple’s iBooks have been working on moving us away from reading physical books and toward embracing the digital revolution. But until now, there was very little to convince us just how good an idea this could be, since digital books look very much like their real-world counterparts, right down to the page-turning effect.
You can save a lot of weight if you tend to carry a few books with you, but no title appeared to offer the limitless potential of a truly digital book, something more akin to what you can achieve with apps, for instance.
Now Apple wants to help users achieve that limitless potential, with the free content-creation application iBooks Author. It aims to revolutionize modern textbooks by bringing interactivity to the learning experience. Not only can you add images to your pages, the reader can zoom in or out of them. You can insert Keynote slides, and embed movies that can be viewed inside a page or full screen. It’s even possible to create short quizzes to test your readers’ knowledge retention.
The tools behave just as they do in iWork apps, such as being able to create charts.
You’d think that all this would require some serious programming chops, but that’s the beauty of iBooks Author: it’s incredibly simple to use, and if you’re familiar with Apple’s iWork suite, you’ll feel right at home within its interface.
It’s a bit like a cross between the iWork apps Pages and Keynote, but you can’t change the page format in any way: it’s designed solely to be used on an iPad—even the iPhone and iPod touch are left out.
Getting Started
Just like other iWork programs, you start with a choice of templates. There are six offered by default, and you can also create your own. You can write straight into iBooks Author, but it’s also easy to import content from Pages or Microsoft Word. Text is brought in seamlessly, but more complex formatting and embedded images can cause problems with the layout. The best option is to bring in the text and then add the multimedia in iBooks Author.
Adding media is child’s play: you have a Media window for locating photos, movies, and music already stored on your Mac. Interactivity is applied with the help of seven widgets, including being able to insert HTML dashcode applets, like those used to create Dashboard widgets on your Mac.
Create complex multiple-choice quizzes. Add the content and iBooks Author takes care of the rest.
You can also preview your work as you design it–connect an iPad to your Mac, click the toolbar’s Preview icon, and your book appears on the iPad for you to check. A purple Proof banner is displayed on the cover of your ebook, and you’ll be able to browse through it and interact with your widgets to make sure they all work as expected.
Once you’re happy with the results, you can export your work in the iBooks format (or as a PDF or text file, but you’ll obviously lose all the interactivity). That iBook can then be transferred to any iPad. It’s a fantastic means of creating your own interactive documents and could do wonders in the classroom.
If you’d rather profit from your endeavor, you’ll need to respect the program’s license agreement, which states that you have to make your work available exclusively on the iBookstore (the content remains yours, of course, so you’re free to redesign your book using a different program and sell it elsewhere). You’ll need to acquire an ISBN number, an industry-standard code designed to catalog all publications. And if you’re not a U.S. resident, you’ll also need a unique reference number from the IRS. However, free books can be made available anywhere without such restrictions.
Room for Improvement
Despite all the things this app allows you to do, and how it will empower teachers and even homeschoolers to design their own textbooks, it’s still a 1.0 product, which means it’s a little rough around the edges at times. Aside from the occasional glitches that prevent you from altering the content in any way (a quick restart of the app solves that problem–thank goodness for Lion’s Autosave feature!), we noticed some odd inconsistencies. For instance, the whole interface is designed around text boxes. You can link them so that your words flow from one box to the other. However, in order for that to work, new linkable text boxes must be created with the help of a text box already present on your page. Text boxes created from scratch by clicking the toolbar icon can’t be linked to others.
Worse still is iBooks Author’s draconian restrictions when it comes to video formats. Only H.264 files are tolerated, but not all H.264 files are created equal. Try dragging a video clip you shot on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad and it’ll be rejected, even though we all know Apple’s iOS products save their footage in H.264. If you export an iMovie project on your Mac, it’s the same problem (you have to use the Share command to create a kosher version). What’s worse is that files made with HandBrake, a video format conversion tool, or created with the excellent screen capture program ScreenFlow, won’t work either–even though you can play back these files directly on your iPad, iBooks Author refuses to. To make them work, you must open them up in QuickTime X and export them for the iPad. It seems like an unnecessary and unintuitive step, far from what we’re used to from Apple.
The bottom line. Despite these problems, iBooks Author is an amazing program that enables anyone to create a polished interactive ebook in little time. If you can live with the license agreement, you can have a lot of fun engaging with your students or customers. As long as they all own iPads, of course.
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