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.
The actual book can also be attached to an email and opened in iBooks from there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by anantksundaram
The caveats (and probably intro-level hiccups) notwithstanding: does iBook Author allow me to dress up a collection of my Word and/or Pages documents into a "book"-like format, then save it as a .iba file, upload it onto some public (or other) folder, from where anyone with an iPad can download and view the 'book'? (Can someone running Lion on a Mac do the same on their Mac?)
If 'yes,' how does someone get it into their iPad?
Add: I guess, simply put, the question I am asking is, can I use iBook Author as a 'private distribution' channel for my work to be distributed directly to those with hardware that can view it, than necessarily having to upload it on to the iBook Store and have people download it from there?
Of course, if Adobe released a product like this it would be fantastically elaborate, with hundreds of fiddly control palettes, almost unbelievably obscure keyboard shortcuts, an extremely steep learning curve, and offloading or replication of much functionality onto other Adobe products. And it would cost $500 or more.
I think Apple has really hit on something here-- while their layout tools will never compete with InDesign, textbooks don't need to be the kind of works of art that require extensive control over every parameter-- the kind of extensive control that keeps design pros well compensated.
Text books need to be functional. Apple has provided the tools to move information into functional, interactive containers, and the delivery system to show off those containers in the best light. Making the tools free and easy to use means text books can be authored more quickly and at lower costs, and providing templates means they can still be well laid out and enjoyable to use.
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.
I wish it just supported LaTeX equation formatting... I'd prefer not to have to buy MathType...
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...
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.
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.
What do you mean? Sure there is. I just did it. It's drag and drop.
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.
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 am thinking photo books for family and friends. It is now VERY easy to create a photo book with video and images and distribute it to relevant parties. Photo books are generally crap but creating them like this is fast and easy, and viewing on iPads is so much better than paper. (Specially when a high res iPad arrives)
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.
I see this not only as a blow to Adobe for the tools, but also to other online retailers like Amazon. They'll have to do some swift work to attract independent authors.
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.
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.
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.)
I'm amused by what people have to say about iBooks Author.
4. I can't get under the hood and tweak the source code!
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.
As far as I can see, they don't handle it at all, which is quite a bummer. I'm not so sure how easy it would be to create some textbooks that call for math, chemical formula, etc?
It works great with Grapher (on all Macs in the Utilities Folder), is Grapher lacking in some way?
What do you mean? Sure there is. I just did it. It's drag and drop.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"I just exported it to PDF because that's the only way to use in on Blackberry and now most of the stuff doesn't work. I'm tired of Apple artificially limiting their products like this."
Comments
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.
The caveats (and probably intro-level hiccups) notwithstanding: does iBook Author allow me to dress up a collection of my Word and/or Pages documents into a "book"-like format, then save it as a .iba file, upload it onto some public (or other) folder, from where anyone with an iPad can download and view the 'book'? (Can someone running Lion on a Mac do the same on their Mac?)
If 'yes,' how does someone get it into their iPad?
Add: I guess, simply put, the question I am asking is, can I use iBook Author as a 'private distribution' channel for my work to be distributed directly to those with hardware that can view it, than necessarily having to upload it on to the iBook Store and have people download it from there?
Of course, if Adobe released a product like this it would be fantastically elaborate, with hundreds of fiddly control palettes, almost unbelievably obscure keyboard shortcuts, an extremely steep learning curve, and offloading or replication of much functionality onto other Adobe products. And it would cost $500 or more.
I think Apple has really hit on something here-- while their layout tools will never compete with InDesign, textbooks don't need to be the kind of works of art that require extensive control over every parameter-- the kind of extensive control that keeps design pros well compensated.
Text books need to be functional. Apple has provided the tools to move information into functional, interactive containers, and the delivery system to show off those containers in the best light. Making the tools free and easy to use means text books can be authored more quickly and at lower costs, and providing templates means they can still be well laid out and enjoyable to use.
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.
I wish it just supported LaTeX equation formatting... I'd prefer not to have to buy MathType...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What do you mean? Sure there is. I just did it. It's drag and drop.
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.
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 am thinking photo books for family and friends. It is now VERY easy to create a photo book with video and images and distribute it to relevant parties. Photo books are generally crap but creating them like this is fast and easy, and viewing on iPads is so much better than paper. (Specially when a high res iPad arrives)
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.
I see this not only as a blow to Adobe for the tools, but also to other online retailers like Amazon. They'll have to do some swift work to attract independent authors.
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.
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.
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.)
I'm amused by what people have to say about iBooks Author.
4. I can't get under the hood and tweak the source code!
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.
As far as I can see, they don't handle it at all, which is quite a bummer. I'm not so sure how easy it would be to create some textbooks that call for math, chemical formula, etc?
It works great with Grapher (on all Macs in the Utilities Folder), is Grapher lacking in some way?
What do you mean? Sure there is. I just did it. It's drag and drop.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"I just exported it to PDF because that's the only way to use in on Blackberry and now most of the stuff doesn't work. I'm tired of Apple artificially limiting their products like this."