First Look: Apple's new iBooks Author - Page 2

I think his point was that it should have been designed to do that. It would be a nice feature but it is counter productive to Apple's dominate the world agenda.

I remember the old days of Quark publishing where you could not import layered Photoshop documents, which meant that you had to save two versions, one flattened tif for importing into Quark and the other as layers in PS for future editing. It was a royal pain in the ass which is why they fixed it.

Similarly it would be nice to be able keep only the finished version of an electronic book and be able to open and edit it. As it is now, you have to keep duplicate versions, one for editing and the other for viewing. The fact that they omitted any support for their former ePub open standards is indicative of their intentions to create an electronic books monopoly which is proprietary to iPad.

Eh, I disagree. ePub reading would have afforded itself much better as an update to Preview.

I really don't want my reading and my editing in one place. People will whine that they can't change a book they've bought on the iBookstore. No duh!

Just put reading in Preview with a gorgeous interface that looks like the iPad app and be done. Leave the creating to the iBooks Author.

Let's not start this debate all over again. Many who haven't upgraded to Lion have been unable to do so for reasons not at all of their own choice or creation.


Amen, brother Peabody. I'm not a professional designer but I figured out this Rule of Life a long time ago. I run received Word documents (or any other type that might harbor formatting) through Text Edit, where I covert it to plain text. It is now safe to use in another document.

True, but his point is, you don't want the original formatting to remain intact. As a document designer, you want to apply your own formatting and not get fouled up by the (usually) clueless formatting used in the source material. You want to nuke that and start from clean.

Actually, I found after some digging that MathType is completely integrated with the Author just like it is in Word...with back and forth.

What I love especially is begging for school funding to get new computers, then having to ask for an OS update 6 months later, then needing to shell out thousands for new versions of all of our software. All because Apple wants to push forward and abandon the existing install base. Sorry but I can't continually justify that.

I work in a school, this is how it is. I can already see the teachers asking me about wanting to use iBooks Author, then not realizing some of our other software won't work on Lion. I mean I can explore running Snow Leopard in a VM, but really?

If Apple was truly interested in accessibility for education, then they would turn the option on in the compiler that says "Snow Leopard" or "Leopard" instead of pretending this app actually needs anything special introduced in Lion.

Have a look here: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/oper...0&qpcustomb=*2

I hate to cloud this announcement with the trivial musings of us education customers, but it is what it is. Half of the OSX install base is using Snow Leopard.

Don't you have more than 1 computer?

Does every computer need to run iBooks author?

Just asking... I have some expensive legacy apps that I don't want to upgrade. So, I run SnowLeopard on a single iMac so I can run these Apps.

I think you could take the reverse approach -- pay $29, upgrade a single Mac to Lion get the free iBooks Author and see how it goes.

Isn't there some bulk Education deal where you can purchase OS X versions for multiple Macs at a discount?

I will ignore the troll and will not bite.

It is curious, though, that Pages have been able to export files into the ePub format for a year and a half now, but the newly released iBooks Author cannot do this. This is especially strange because the entire iBooks store is based on the ePub format. I would have liked iBooks Author much more if it could open ePub books, edit them, and then save (or export) in the ePub format.

I have never done any book authoring, but have accumulated thousands of pages of technical documentation that I have written over many years. I have been doing this in MS Word (in Windows and later in Mac OS X). I was really hoping I could use iBooks Author to migrate my documentation to the ePub format and be able to read it both on my Macs and my iOS devices. So, I spent a few hours today researching other tools that could help me do this. Sigil seems to be the tool that I can use for opening, editing (and reading), as well as saving files in ePub. Calibre would be good for converting PDF files into ePub. So, I would have to use MS Word 2011 for Mac to save a file as a PDF, then use Calibre to convert this PDF into ePub, and finally, use Sigil to make corrections and additions to the file if needed. It would have been much more convenient if iBooks Author could do all these functions.

I realize that for aspiring authors - especially for those who want to try and sell their books on the iBooks store - iBooks Author is an awesome app. However, I am not going to convert the tens of thousands of pages I have written over many years into plain text, then import them into iBooks Author, and then spend hundreds of hours reformatting the text back to the way it looked in MS Word just to be able to export it again into a propitiatory .ibooks format so that I can transfer them to my iOS devices. The ePub method described above is a lot more straightforward and less time consuming, if a little convoluted.

That may be the case, but iBook Authors uses a variety of features that depend on Lion. It would be silly to target a 3 year old version of the OS just to make sure people who don't upgrade can run it. Doing so would forgo all the work Apple's put into Lion to give it modern features.

They'd also have to test and QA support for pre-autosave/revisions and older typography features and all sorts of things.

All because you can't afford to upgrade one authoring Mac to Lion for the purposes of generating content? Perhaps you can spend $29 of your own, given that the app is FREE!

Wow

Apple wasn't targeting a broad spectrum of publishers with various needs. It is aiming at textbooks, and giving everyone else an awesome publishing tool they can use.

If you wrote your docs in Word, you should still have the text you can import. EPUB is a distribution format, not really a mobile authoring format. It's like saying you have a website you want to convert to a book but you don't have the text handy. What?

Exactly, what????

Not at 3 years.

philip

What about typographic flexibility, a major weakness of ebooks? Just how free are creators/authors allowed to be over choice of fonts and formatting?

Here's a working link.

It's just publishing SW...what's so special that it requires a new OS? $29 or not, they're just books, maybe with some multimedia. I still run SL, as I see no reason to update, requiring Lion for some features like iCloud or iBooks Author just seems artificial, like something Microsoft would do.

In a couple generations, I guess we'll look back and wonder how people didn't read books without requiring an SW update first...and as a side note, I find it somewhat amusing that, even though my 1st gen iPod Touch still works fine, it can't run iBooks, as it requires iOS 4.2 or above. Sure, it runs on my iPhone 4S, but what happens when there's a book that I want, published for a certain version of iBooks, which requires a certain OS, which then requires certain HW...it's an extreme case, and while devices get outdated, but there just books.

It just seems like trying to re-invent the wheel.

The only thing that surprises me is that it's a separate application. We had discussion around the office when the iPad was first released that Apple would rework either Pages or Keynote to produce iPad content - we figured it was just a matter of time.
I would loved to have seen it with all the animations available in Keynote. Probably not compatible with the ePub format but still nice to dream about

No doubt the debated bundling it into Pages, but I bet they thought it needed too many of its own custom buttons and its own custom toolbar and that it would be taken far more serious if it was its own app with its own name. Dedicated to education.

Who knows, perhaps the next version of pages will get its own "publish" button capable of getting your first novel into iBooks. I would have thought for certain they'd also include a setting to publish magazines this way though, the general layout of the Our Choice-esque books are perfectly suited to magazines, as I tweeted 10 months ago. And the world would be a better place if all iPad magazines were like this, intuitive, consistent, enjoyable and beautiful. As opposeð to the current situation; unreadable.

But seriously, how many apps are there that either don't work in Lion or don't have an alternative that is free or cheaper than the original application.

I keep seeing all these posts about how people are using applications that don't run in Lion but they never tell us what they are. Quicken is about the only one I keep hearing about. Let's face it if you're still using an application made by a company that clearly doesn't give a toss about you when there are alternatives that are cheaper that pretty much do the same thing then why should Apple be made to look like that bad guy when you're the ones suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

What apps are SOOOOO important you can't speak with your dollar and move away? Please tell me because I want to know. I am genuinely wanting to know.

Your 1st Gen iPod Touch doesn't stand a chance of running the books because the content in them would overload the processor. We're not talking movies or pictures or text or javascript widgets we're talking movies AND pictures AND text AND javascript widgets. That's a lot for a device and that's not adding to the fact that reading on a small screen is dumb anyway. iPad makes sense because it has the screen real-estate to make it work.

I wish it just supported LaTeX equation formatting... I'd prefer not to have to buy MathType, and from people who have used it I've heard that it is not as powerful as LaTeX.

But what really confuses me is the lack of bibliography/citation/endnote capability. Pages has had this problem as well, and it makes it impossible to use for any serious technical writing. I hope they fix this, because I can't imagine a textbook tool which doesn't have the ability to include citations...

Also, perhaps I've missed how, but there doesn't seem to be a way to add a hyperlink to a table, only to figures or interactives. This seems like an odd omission...

The books it produces seem very pretty, but it is currently missing some key capabilities.

EDIT: figured out how to link to Tables. I had imported a Word document with lots of tables and it broke all the links. Have to manually recreate them.

Cripes, not this crap again. Yes, Quicken is one. We don't stay with Quicken because we love Intuit. Nobody loves Intuit. We are stuck because there is no alternative that does everything Quicken does. And please don't give us a list of names. We know, we've looked carefully into all of them, so we know that none of them will substitute for Quicken. Got it?

In my case, I also rely on an older version of FileMaker for an important part of my business. Other than the fact that it is not Lion compatible, it works fine amd does exactly what i need The cost of replacement with the current version is $300 per seat. Too much and not necessary. Got it?

Finally some of are invested in printers that might not be supported with compatible drivers. So now we could find ourselves junking a perfectly good printer and spending a grand to replace it. And why would we want that?

And that only covers those of us who have Lion compatible hardware.

Got it?

In the app, just choose to export in the iBooks format. This will create a file with the .ibooks extension. The actual file that you're working on is saved with an .iba extension.

I have a 2.5MB sample in the public folder of my Dropbox account. There's an embedded 2-slide Keynote on Page 3.

You can open the link in Mobile Safari on iPad, and choose to open the file in iBooks.

Here's the link:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/356146/Fring...ng%20Of.ibooks

The actual book can also be attached to an email and opened in iBooks from there.

Duplicate

An export to HTML5 for web deployment would be a nice touch ... But I guess that won't happen as Apple are less and less web and more and more Internet direct these days and Google's ad sales seem to show this is working.

You don't have to buy anything. Every copy of Mac OS X includes an app called Grapher (Utilities > Grapher) that creates beautiful equations that you can copy and paste into Pages, Keynote, iBooks Author...

I don't think they're beautiful. For example, the limits of an integral are awkwardly placed.

But so what? Equation Editor seems to work pretty well with Pages and Author, so why not use that? Increases the value you get when you pay for Word.

Rename your test.iba to test.zip and uncompress the file.

You will find in it all your assets, and index.xml, and a preview pdf for chapters.

It seems to be missing a style sheet.

I hope someone will come up with a quick application that will convert this to something usable on a website. Granted an imbedded keynote won't play on a website, but images, text, and video will do just fine.

I'm amused by what people have to say about iBooks Author.

1. It's limited to Lion and I run Snow Leopard!

So upgrade.

2. It won't read electronic books!

It's not supposed to. It's also not designed to fix your leaky faucet.

3. If I sell the book, I can only sell it on Apple's bookstore. Scandal!

Even magazines ask for exclusives. This only affects everything you write with iBooks Author. You can publish anything else anywhere else, but iBooks Author is just the front end for iBookstore. Apple can't guarantee or even foresee the performance on someone else's platform, if for no other reason that they are moving targets.

4. I can't get under the hood and tweak the source code!

iBooks Author was designed for teachers, not programmers. If you are a programmer, you know about use cases, and you know that the specifications are defined by what the software can do, what it cannot do, what platform it requires, who the anticipated users are, and what the users' skill set is. If you don't fall within their use cases, then they didn't design it for you. No software has all possible features for all possible users on all possible operating systems. That's why you need more than one application on your computer.

5. It only works on Macs!

Apple is a hardware company. OS X is a component of the product. Apple's other software exists to sell the hardware. Anyway, if Apple wanted to make iBook Author run on all operating systems, how long would it take to put out version 1? Apple's market share among the targeted audience is relatively high.

There are a lot of good things about this app but I am surprised that it does not provide the ability to rearrange pages. If you are creating the book with this app rather than importing it, this is a fundamental problem.

And don't forget to hang onto your Snow Leopard disk so that you can replace the basic apps that Apple wrecked in the upgrade.

What do you mean? Sure there is. I just did it. It's drag and drop.

There is a reason why it is done this way. Beyond the basic rules of good housekeeping, it greatly reduces the file size. Frankly, the business of placing Photoshop files in a publishing document is lazy. If you need to edit something, just launch the Photoshop file and output the result. The link to the flattened file does not change.

I've been having to work with a ton of legacy files from a designer who did everything but the text in Photoshop. He could have limited the Photoshop content to background art and photos and handled everything else in Illustrator. Instead, if I need to move a photo, update a logo, or do anything beyond text editing, I have to waste an enormous amount of time messing with the layered Photoshop document, constantly jumping between the two apps to make sure everything lines up properly. If it had been done properly, I could just select the desired items and hit a button to align them. This is hugely inefficient.

I agree the idea of being able to make easy photo books seems like a great idea. It is a shame that there is no way of bringing in photo books from iPhoto as a starting point. So that one can produce real books and then an enhanced version for the iPad.

Playing today I haven't found exactly the right format to create an optimum photo book (for example does one need to reduce the size of the images or does iBook Creator do that automatically when you save it.

So some playing but a great starting point as others have said it is a shame there aren't more ways to get content in from other tools but still very cool.

Though maybe this is Apple fighting back. Amazon has tools for authors to publish on the Kindle and even have a monthly fund they give to authors who make their books lend able and I'm sure both sides will come up with incentives for Authors the people who are about to loose out are the publishers and literary agents

As Amazon and Apple fight over this hopefully not only will authors do better but so will consumers.

Depends on your work flow requirements. Personally I like having just the layered file. PSD files are compressed and the overall disk space used is less using just a single file. Furthermore when working in the DTP document you can right click to edit the placed image and it will open in PS and upon saving it will automatically update the link. Afterwards when you package the project using the built in function, you know that you have all the original source files and the project is completely editable in the future. That for me is much better housekeeping than having to manually keep track of original source files.

(One gotcha' is if you place images or other files into an illustrator document and then place that Illustrator document into your DTP page, packaging the project may not always gather embedded links two or more levels deep.)

This actually is a problem in many situations. I have been playing around with the software and also downloaded the 'Life on Earth" textbook. In my opinion iBooks and iBooks Author are beta level of completion. The textbook crashed many times mostly when rotating the perspective while the movie is loading.

The fact that you can't tweak the source code is only an issue when the title grows in size. Textbooks tend to be rather large documents and the more interactive content you place in them the larger they get, potentially reaching gigabytes in size. Opening and exporting those types of documents is very unwieldy. If you are just trying to tweak a line of javascript or a line of CSS, reexporting the entire thing over and over is not a trivial undertaking. That is why I believe they stated that its primary use was for K-12 where the books tend to be a bit smaller. Also Linking to movies is a much better use of disk space rather than embedding them. I believe the main reason that Apple chose not to allow us to edit the code, to embed everything rather than link and to use binary output instead of the traditional zipped archive format is to keep it proprietary.

It works great with Grapher (on all Macs in the Utilities Folder), is Grapher lacking in some way?

Some of the comments are just silly aren't they? One guy is moaning you can't edit the text because he is trying to edit the Latin place holder! One downside of the app being free - everyone is trying it even the clueless ... half the people finding faults on the App Store comments page clearly have never learned to use any iWork app or iWeb.

Doesn't the fact an iBook Author makes interactive books with hyper links to anything you like just about, from other pages to glossaries even to updatable web pages you could host, mean the entire concept of how a book is laid out should be rethought? So many things such as footnotes are devices to get around the limitations of the printed page dating back to invention of movable type.

I found some info on running iBooks Author on Snow Leopard:

http://www.digitaltweaker.com/mac/ma...-snow-leopard/

It is about a 20 step hackerish work around.

I haven't tried it and even the author recommends upgrading to Lion for any professional work, just an FYI