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Apple's latest acquisition is a printing press for the iPad
Want to make a digital magazine but Apple's iBook Author app just doesn't offer what you want? Then perhaps Cupertino's latest buy could signal a coming change that'll help you out. The iPhone company has purchased Prss, the digital publishing outfit behind Trvl, which TechCrunch notes was the first iPad-only newsstand publication way back in 2010. Prss' niche is that it allows you to make snazzy-looking iPad mags without needing to know any coding. The news started as an anonymously-sourced report from Dutch iOS blog, iCulture, but Apple confirmed the vowel-averse company's acquisition to TC, stating that it buys smaller tech firms from time to time and "generally do [does] not discuss our [its] plans or purposes." Here's to hoping that this pick-up is a bit less tumultuous than Tim Cook's last purchase. [Image credit: AFP/Getty Images]
Timothy J. Seppala09.23.2014
Apple updates iBooks Author with iBooks for OS X support
Apple has released an update to iBooks Author, its iBooks design, layout, and creation software for OS X. The iBooks Author 2.1 update addresses a number of stability issues and bug fixes, as well as adding support for the new iBooks app included in OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Now with the click of a button iBooks creators can quickly preview the current book they are creating directly in iBooks for OS X. What's New in Version 2.1 • Preview books in iBooks for Mac • Addresses an issue that removed enhanced caption tracks from some movies • Includes various bug fixes and performance improvements And with the new release of iBooks for Mac, books made with iBooks Author can now be read on the Mac. iBooks Author is a free download.
Michael Grothaus10.22.2013
New iBooks Author supports LaTeX and MathML
LaTeX is document markup system (similar to the popular Markdown) that's popular among high-level academia and mathematics authors. iBooks Author 2, which was released during Apple's big event, now supports the LaTeX protocol. It works through the MathML markup language, which a lot of educational textbooks often use for marking up and displaying complex mathematical equations and formulas. In other words, iBooks Author has gained significant functionality for working together with a markup language already used by education professionals, mathematics authors and students. That fits right in line with Apple intentions for iBooks Author, namely the creation of academic documents for college curriculums and classes. That's good news for anyone who commonly uses this language, as they can now load up iBooks Author and continue their work there. This is a small, very technical change, that accomplishes Apple's mission of making this software work for the systems already being used to create higher education texts. [via Michael Tsai]
Mike Schramm10.25.2012
iBook lessons: Mac clients and built-in updates
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about e-book writing and publishing. Since yesterday's announcement, I've been having a series of conversations -- in email, on the phone, on Twitter -- regarding iBooks, the iBookstore, and why iBooks for Mac remains missing in action. Many in the book world are well aware that Amazon's Kindle reader runs on nearly every platform you can think of, from iOS to Android, OS X to Windows, and in web browsers as well. In a world guided by DRM, readers can ubiquitously access Kindle purchases. Apple's iBookstore continues to have a single client: iBooks for iOS. Yes, the iPad is a delightful reading platform. At the same time, there's no denying that Amazon outpaces iBookstore sales for nearly every title I've worked with. Customers like the control Kindle offers them in how and where they read their books. When faced with a buying choice, readers regularly choose Kindle by a wide margin. There isn't a practical option for a third-party iBooks solution for OS X and Windows. DRM encryption means reverse-engineering Apple's system, an unrealistic basis for establishing a business. Plus, I'm sure Apple has already explored the notion of a desktop client in the run-up to the January 2010 iBooks announcement and since then. I remain puzzled though as to why Apple is not pushing to release iBooks for Mac. I can't imagine that the technical issues for a desktop-based reader are that insurmountable, so it must be a marketing and business decision, or a failure to staff and push the initiative. A Mac and Windows reader would certainly increase book sales; could it depress iPad sales? I wouldn't think so. iBooks 3 launched yesterday, bringing with it expanded dictionaries and continuously scrolling titles. This latter is what Mike T. Rose calls "Megillah" mode, referring to a book traditionally presented as a single scroll of text. In addition, the iBookstore will now allow publishers to push book updates, letting books receive new versions the same way apps do. From an author/publisher's point of view, this provides a mixed bag of blessings and frustrations. For the most part, when a book is done, it's done. Books go through an extended process of reviews and edits that put most apps to shame. Publishers do their best to produce the most polished creations they can, and post errata for any flaws that slip through the cracks. For top-selling books, errors can be fixed in subsequent printings, but all updates involve a huge investment in production overhead and page layout. The costs have to be worth it. In the apps world, it's common to push out point releases that offer simple bug fixes. The new iBookstore update feature is where books meet apps, and it's something that offers mixed benefits. Publishers will welcome the ability to tweak and refine manuscripts. Readers, however, may expect a commitment to relentless perfection that book creators cannot provide. With updates, e-books -- like apps -- become a project that never ends. Will readers revolt with one-star reviews when authors create enhanced and new editions -- now a common practice -- rather than pushing those updates to existing customers? Book updates, like app updates, don't offer a paid upgrade path and there are, as yet, no in-book purchase programs. Mistakes happen; they are part of the human experience. As an author and publisher, I'm glad the update mechanism exists. Trying to push an update through Amazon last year was a huge hassle, and Apple's approach looks far friendlier. But will updates become a big part of my publishing methodology? At this time, I see them as a safety mechanism, not an opportunity for growing a new business.
Erica Sadun10.24.2012
Apple releases iBooks 3, iBooks Author 2
Hours after announcing updates to iBooks and iBooks Author at Tuesday's iPad mini event, Apple has released iBooks 3 through the App Store and iBooks Author 2 through the Mac App Store. iBooks 3 changes include: The ability to see all iBookstore purchases in iCloud in iOS 6 Endless scrolling Receive free updates to purchased books, including new chapters, corrections and other improvements Look up definitions in German, Spanish, French, Japanese and Simplified Chinese in iOS6 Share book excerpts through Facebook, Twitter, Messages or Mail iBooks Author 2 changes include: The ability to create portrait-only books Embed custom fonts into books Additional interactivity with new scrolling sidebar and pop-over widgets Support for mathematical expressions with equation editing using LaTeX and MathML notation Automatic media optimization for iPad Improved support for embedded audio Improved publishing workflow, including automatic book samples and pre-publish checking Additional templates Version numbering Retina display enhancing for the new MacBook Pros Other performance and usability improvements
Megan Lavey-Heaton10.24.2012
Apple's Oct. 23rd event roundup: iPad mini, 4th gen iPad, new iMac, 13-inch Retina MBP and more
Apple teased that it had "a little more to show" us prior to today's San Francisco event, but it's clear now that the phrasing was humble at best. Not only has the much-anticipated, rumored and leaked 7.9-inch iPad mini been officially revealed, but so has a smattering of new and refreshed offerings across its range of gizmos. The standard iPad is seeing its fastest refresh yet (about six months) to a Lighting port and A6X-packing fourth-generation model, and the iMac has ditched its optical drive to go Air-thin in its Ivy Bridge-driven seventh-generation. Mobile power users should be especially be pleased, too, as a 13-inch variant of the MacBook Pro with a 2,560 x 1,600 Retina Display is now a reality. Lest we forgot that the iBooks app and iBooks Author have both been updated -- right on cue with that book-like iPad Mini. Hop past the break for a full listing of all the news and all of our on-scene coverage that came out of today's event.
Joe Pollicino10.23.2012
Daily Update for October 23, 2012
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Steve Sande10.23.2012
Apple updates iBooks Author with support for multitouch widgets, OTA book updates
Apple used its press event today to introduce a new version of iBooks Author. The latest version of the book authoring tool lets users embed custom fonts, insert mathematical equations into a book and add multitouch widgets. There's also over-the-air book updates and a handful of new templates including some for portrait mode. iBooks Author is available for free in the Mac App Store. The latest update will be available later today.
Kelly Hodgkins10.23.2012
Apple unveils new version of iBooks with continuous scrolling, iBooks Author also updated
Apple CEO Tim Cook took to a San Jose theater stage today to unveil a new version of the company's literature-based digital storefront, iBooks. Cook says it integrates better with iCloud, allows for quote sharing on Facebook and Twitter, and has support for "over 40 languages." Beyond the app update info, Cook touted iBook's sales exceeding 400 million books worldwide -- not too shabby! The updated iBooks app should be available today on the iOS App Store, though it's not there just yet. Update: It looks like iBooks Author is also getting an update today, as Cook says new templates, fonts, and user-created fonts are now supported. Additionally, mathematical equations can now be inserted directly, and multitouch widgets will also work. For more coverage, visit our Apple Special Event hub!
Ben Gilbert10.23.2012
Why Amazon's Whispercast matters
Apple's upcoming media event isn't scheduled until next week. I've already gone on record about my views about the so-called iPad mini's potential. I think with the mini, Apple has a big chance to push forward the education initiative the company introduced earlier this year. That's why Amazon's Whispercast announcement this week, detailing a solution for managing a fleet of Kindles, matters. Amazon Kindle VP David Limp described the new technology: "Whispercast [is] a free, scalable solution for school and business administrators to centrally manage thousands of Kindles and wirelessly distribute Kindle books...to their users." A free online tool, Whispercast enables central content administration for procuring, distributing and monitoring Kindle books. With it, schools and districts can adopt Kindle technology across their entire system. What's more, administrators can set acceptable use policies, such as blocking social networks and web browsers, keeping students from accessing Facebook with their Whispercast devices. We don't know what Apple's event will cover, but this kind of large-scale deployment sets a bar that Apple needs to meet -- soon if not next week. At TUAW, we believe that winning the classroom will win the tablet. If Apple cannot respond to Whispercast, they cannot win that classroom. Apple's enterprise tools for iOS and support for mobile device management have advantages for big organizations, but the textbook (and app) volume purchasing setup doesn't have quite the fluidity of what Whispercast will deliver. MDM at a basic level is doable with Apple's Mountain Lion Server, but larger deployments may require extensive IT support and investment, which most schools don't have at their disposal. In contrast, Whispercast is cloud-based and free. (There are several cloud-based MDM options for iOS, to be sure, with Meraki, Zenprise and MaaS360 among them, but they aren't free.) Whispercast is far from an education panacea, however. While Whispercast offers large-scale setup and deployment, it seems to lack program analysis: tracking, testing and assessment of student success. Whispercast modernizes the textbook but it doesn't directly address the learning process. That's an area in which Apple has shown leadership. In January, Apple attempted to reimagine the textbook. It introduced iBooks Author, a design tool meant to revolutionize e-book layout and creation. With numerous technologies to engage students, its textbooks are certainly more exciting and beautiful. But these enhancements still lack an important component of digital education. Although iBooks Author provides an option to create review widgets, it lacks any communication capabilities to send quiz results or assessments back to teachers. Third parties have worked on creating solutions, but the purely educational component of bidirectional assessment seems to be an area that remains up in the air. Meanwhile, companies focused on learning management and delivery systems for adult/institutional education (outside the iBooks ecosystem) are pushing the tablet envelope forward at a frantic pace, and the largest higher-ed trial of bulk purchasing for e-textbooks is happening without Apple's direct participation. We believe that a truly successful tablet for K-12 and higher ed needs to command respect in all the natural areas of educational support: from document distribution, to platform control, to lesson planning, to assessment. Whispercast is a big step forward. We can't wait to see how Apple responds.
Erica Sadun10.19.2012
Why the iPad mini? One word: Textbooks
I was at the dentist the other day, where I was talking to Laura-the-receptionist about tablets. "I'm sick of paying for rebinding [my kids' textbooks] every year," she told me. "My kid's teacher suggested we buy a tablet and purchase textbooks from Amazon instead of fixing them. Which tablet should I buy?" Although schools pay a nominal fee per rebinding, parents often have to cough up a significant amount more. Cherry Creek High School charges $28 to rebind a single book. The eBook text costs just $14.99. It's a bargain until you start considering the tablet overhead. The base Kindle sells for $70; the Fire for $200 -- although you can now buy used models for significantly less. The base iPad 2 starts at $399 and refurbished units are scarce on the ground at the online Apple Store. The Apple experience, it's clear, comes at a premium. Although the Fire represents an outlay of nearly 3x more than the Kindle, many parents like the idea that their kid can surf the web, read email, and even run graphing calculator apps. As a point of reference, the TI NSpire sells for "just" $150 on Amazon (MSRP is $175.) iPads are even more desirable, with their well-designed interface, expansive app store and broad support ecosystem. But they fail to compete on the basis of their price tag compared to a base Kindle + a TI calculator. Between textbooks, research-related web access, calculator features, and e-mail contact with teachers, more parents than ever are on the hunt for inexpensive tablets, with the emphasis on inexpensive. So why go tablet? Apple laid out many of the reasons in its education event early this year. The iPad, as Apple reminded us, communicates with the world. Apple has built an education business based on "teaching, learning, and student achievement" with over 20,000 iPad apps specific to education. Apple's education-centric iBooks Author initiative focused on recreating the textbook. It attempted to engage students and expand the learning experience. The problem with that initiative is that Apple's bottom-line hardware starts at a price that's double that of the competition. To make the iPad a real choice in the education marketplace, Apple needs an entry that competes with the bargain-basement tablets. iPads may be on every teen's Christmas wishlist, but parents are hard-pressed not to compare bottom lines. That's why there's going to be the iPad mini. On October 23, Apple will likely launch a scaled-down iPad with basic features and a consumer-ready price. This is the event that parents like Laura have been waiting for. For many, the iPad mini means that Apple will be a choice in a market where formerly parents might have felt priced out of buying. A smaller screen size and fewer options may allow students and their parents -- whether middle school, high school, or college -- to buy into the Apple ecosystem, where they formerly could not. In the end, Apple's entire drive towards re-inventing the textbook doesn't matter if there aren't enough eyeballs and fingers to appreciate those titles with their rich tapestry of interactive design. An iPad mini will open the education market to a much broader range of customers and allow Apple to grow a customer base by investing in the future.
Erica Sadun10.14.2012iBook Lessons: Traditional publishers react to new trends
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. A year ago, traditional publishers seemed hopelessly left behind as a new world of instant-pub media emerged. Self-publishing, specifically via services and tools like those provided by Apple's iBookstore/iBooks Author and Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, provided a way for independent authors to challenge the marketplace. Independent authors could write, publish and distribute short works that followed closely on trends as they happened. As new technology was announced, writers could immediately address that market. Apple might introduce a new OS bump or deliver a new tablet. Indie authors could develop and deliver materials on a new kind of timeline, often just weeks after an announcement. Last year, Apple launched the iPhone 4S in early October, a device offering the new Siri virtual assistant. By the end of October, Steve Sande and I had written and self-published "Talking to Siri", a guide to the new technology. If we had worked with traditional publishing at that point, it would likely have taken at least four to six months to get that same book out. In the end, we were able to leverage the success of our self-published efforts to create a deal with Que, one of Pearson's (Addison Wesley) technical imprints to bring "Talking to Siri" to the printed page. The book was printed in the Winter of 2012, months after Siri launched and has sold consistently well in traditional bookstores like Barnes & Noble, as well as on the virtual shelves of Amazon and the iBookstore. We both feel our early launch was a key player in this success. Fast forward a year, and the world has begun to turn upside down. Traditional publishers are now tentatively exploring the frontier of rapid publishing. It's not an easy change. A lot of work goes into delivering a professionally produced book. Production, digital conversion, marketing, business and web site support teams all have to come together to make this happen. Pearson just launched an Early Edition program to offer readers advanced access to new, timely topics. Early Editions provide early peeks at books during the production process. It allows readers to buy-in much sooner, to get access to relevant materials -- even in a somewhat unfinished state. It trades off this rapid delivery to its audience against the time-intensive process that ensures high quality published editions. The fact is this: The tech world moves quickly. Apple typically updates its hardware and software on a yearly basis. A book that takes six months to produce may offer an unreasonably shortened shelf life. Consider developer-specific topics, for example. Taking Apple's no-pub Nondisclosure Agreement periods (NDAs) into account, where material cannot be publicly discussed, each year may offer at best nine months of sales availability. Cutting off a third to a half of this time due to publishing delays puts huge pressures on authors and publishers. The quicker publishers can move materials into the public, the longer each book's shelf life can be, and the more possible sales it can offer. I was fortunate to be part of Pearson's first Early Edition push. My Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook went live the day after the iOS 6 NDA dropped. In exchange for basically working non-stop since WWDC, Pearson was able to accelerate editing and technical review. Readers can now purchase a volume that although not perfectly polished, offers time-sensitive content that's useful for immediate iOS 6 development needs. For me, from an author's point of view, it's a huge step forward. Moving to a world of quick pub turn-around didn't come easily. Development editors Chris Zahn and Dayna Isley spearheaded the Pearson initiative, with strong encouragement from management. An in-house group titled "Digital Only / Digital First" helped imagine their digital strategy. The digital task force included a cross section of editorial, production, conversion and marketing folks. The team brainstormed how to publish e-formats before print versions came out. They decided on a group of books to focus on (the iOS 6 series) and chose to move content into ePub, Mobi, and PDF formats right after copy edit. This is right before manuscripts would traditionally go into the composition process and then eventually to the printer. The harder issues weren't authoring and editing content; it was paperwork. "As a group, we had to figure out how to get out of our own way," Zahn explained. "We had to decide how to enter products into our business systems, how to present them for sale on our site and how to market them. We got marketing, the InformIT folks and production on board. Somehow it all came together, and we ended up with a successful rollout of the Early Edition program this October." Today, I had a chance to sit down with Paul Boger, Vice-President and Publisher at Pearson Technology Group. He's the man who gave the green light to the Early Editions program. He took some time to talk about the evolution of the book, about the program itself, and where traditional publishers need to move when looking to the future. TUAW: Tell me about the Early Edition program. PB: We, here at Pearson, have a number of people here who are intensely interested in figuring out how to break the mold of the physical book. We're exploring how to move beyond the constraints of the physical production process to provide critical information to people as fast as we possibly can. The Early Edition program is part of that vision. We have a number of people in our group -- Dana Isley, Chris Zahn, Trina MacDonald, Stephanie Nakib -- who believed that we could, with tweaks to our process, publish weeks ahead of the physical book if were able to bend the process a little bit. So that group of people got together to do this with our line of iOS 6 books (including the Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook, Learning Objective-C 2.0, and Programming in Objective-C) for the new Early Editions. In the process, we're learning a lot. It's helping make our readers and authors really happy by getting ideas and expertise out even faster. TUAW: What were some of the challenges you've encountered? PB: A lot of the challenges are cultural rather than physical. We're book publishers by professional training. We're used to thinking that content needs to look a certain way, be presented a certain way, be finished to a certain level. We're trying really hard to put those assumptions away. We're learning to disregard those knee-jerk opinions about when something is "finished" and "usable" and when it's not. One of the concepts we haven't cracked yet is how and when can we create "books" (I use air quotes there) that are never really finished. How do you create new books that are alive all the time? We're not there yet but we're working on that problem really hard. TUAW: What does it mean to be a "book" -- I'll use the air quotes, too -- in the world of electronic publishing? PB: I think the word "book" is changing to mean something printed on paper, contained between two covers, and sold as a unit. Ebooks mean something different. Ebooks are developing their own set of commercial expectations -- whether it's the author or reader who has set those expectations. Plus, we think there's something else we haven't named yet in the mix. We use the catchphrase "content" but it's something quite different. For example, what does it mean to "buy" a book when it's something that can be updated? Tech publishers have played around with the subscription model, with Wiki-based books, and so forth. We at Pearson publish content with Safari Books Online. It's a purely digital delivery platform with no physical component. When someone buys a printed book, I think increasingly they're buying the physical manifestation of content at a certain point in time. When they buy an ebook, I think that expectations at least for tech consumers is that that content will continue changing. More and more our customers expect when they buy that ebook they'll receive updates. When technology changes or there are new techniques, consumers expect the content to change in real time. Publishers have to catch up with that expectation and they really haven't yet. TUAW: What are consumers looking for in electronic books? And how can these books remain current and fresh? At some level, what you're buying is the author's expertise and the question remains: How does the publication vehicle help an author deliver that expertise in a way that is efficient for everyone? Obviously, authors can't spend 24/7 updating just one product -- there are a whole family of products to attend to, plus blog plus other things [that an author might be involved in]. Publishers have to make it easy for authors to interact with customers and update content. And we have other challenges. In my group, for instance in Sams Publishing, we publish a lot of open source texts that change all the time. When have we compiled enough changes to justify releasing a new edition of an 800 or 1000 page "book"? That's the physical challenge, namely when have there been enough changes to have customer buy a new book versus how do we deliver new info for people who've bought existing books? Ebook updates may be one way to do that -- but we all feel there's a better way, we just haven't discovered it yet. TUAW: How does publishing have to change? PB: Traditional publishers are being forced to examine the value and services that they create for authors and for end-users. Maybe I should use the word readers here, instead, but we have for a long time considered them end-users. We're lucky to work at a place like Pearson where there's pressure on us to innovate and think outside the box. It's an exciting and terrifying time to be a publisher because you're not just competing with other publishers but also with app developers, websites that help answer specific questions, and even with people who send alerts to someone's phone. We're now working with schools who deliver their courses online and adapting to the whole phenomenon of "MOOCs," massively open online courses. I've never experienced this much change in my entire career, when it comes to teaching people how to do things. We're trying to explore every opportunity and still pay the light bill. TUAW: What would an ideal book look like? PB: My ideal would involve a digital content presentation that allows interactivity where appropriate, where it adds value rather than just representing a distraction with bells and whistles. The ideal book could be regularly updated based on customer feedback collected either within the book itself or provided by readers/customers via a direct relationship with the author and the publisher. The ideal book could be printed and provided to physical bookstores, when it was efficient or necessary to do that. But I think we'd start with a digital presentation of the information and then add value to that experience. TUAW: What kinds of test programs are you working with now? PB: One of our groups is experimenting with iBooks and ePub. They're trying to figure out how to create better ebook experiences. Then there's the early edition program and some work we're developing on interactive learning. In another part of our business, we're developing simulation software for certification students. We're moving our certification content to a digital learning platform called "My Labs." Pearson developed this for the education market to provide assessment and remediation. It includes video and simulation content, and is intended for use in labs setting. We sell that to the education market primarily. And, we have a longstanding video training program that we're currently expanding. We sell these on our website and through Safari Books Online. Plus we've got all kinds of other stuff going on as well. All of these depend on our authors. Open minded authors are still the primary component of our success. Nothing good happens if we're not willing to try sailing on new seas every once in a while. Our Early Editions program wouldn't be available if authors like you weren't willing to experiment with us. It's a really exciting time. You can follow Paul on Twitter at @pboger.
Erica Sadun10.03.2012iBook Lessons: Adding ASL support to iBooks
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Bilingual books have existed for a long time. Bilingual ebooks have also shown a presence in online stores. Adding American Sign Language (ASL) editions to ebooks? That's a proposition that has been hard to accomplish although possible under current EPUB standards. The reason is that video and text must coexist on the virtual page. That's hard to do with ebooks, and impossible in conventional books. With the iPad and iBooks Author, that challenge has now become possible. Recently, author Adam Stone published his first ASL/English bilingual ebook. Called Pointy Three, it tells the story of a fork that's missing one of its prongs but not, as the description points out, its spirit. The fork journeys through the land of Dinnertime, having adventures and looking for a place where he belongs. The book's possibly unique ASL/English approach offers something new and special. Stone explains that children who use both languages, or who are learning ASL, benefit from this bilingual approach. On his blog, he writes, "[It] is not simply an English story translated into ASL; it is a story created with both languages in mind, swirling around the creative consciousness." His motivation sprang from a desire to let children play with both languages. With iBooks Author, Apple provided the perfect tool for his needs. "I want to show everybody that it can be done easily, quickly, and cheaply," he wrote on his blog. "You don't need to talk to a publisher; you are the publisher." He added in a note to TUAW that "Apple products constantly open new frontiers." I had the pleasure of sitting down with him to discuss his journey into iBooks Author, and talk about how the tool had inspired him. TUAW: So how did you first hear about iBooks Author? And did you immediately think about ASL? Stone: I first heard about it during Apple's education event this past Winter. I'd already been experimenting with American Sign Language ebooks. I was trying to use Composer by Demibooks but I was having a lot of trouble with that particular tool. When I saw the iBooks Author product I immediately knew it was perfect for what I had in mind. I work at P.S. 347 The ASL and English Lower School (it's an ASL/English bilingual school). I use ASL all day so it's always on my mind. (I dedicate the book to the school, in fact - at the end of the book.) iBooks Author looked super easy to use. Obviously video was a prominent part of the iBooks Author presentation. The layout tools looked flexible. And I especially liked how it was already linked to the iBookstore; it meant that publishing it would be easy. TUAW: How did you develop the story for Pointy Three? And did you always intend to be writing for children? Stone: I wanted this book to be a point of inspiration for others. There are a lot of us who are concerned about the lack of ASL/English materials for children and who are thinking of ways to ameliorate that. So this book was first and foremost to set an example -- to tell others, "You can do this too! We all can do this!" I wanted to do a children's book first. I'm already a first grade teacher; I read children's books every day. I think adults should read children's books more often. They really are magical. Pointy Three came to me out of the blue about a week after the Apple presentation. I was sitting on the N train and suddenly I thought of a three-pronged fork. And I typed out the whole story using Notes on my iPhone. It hasn't changed very much since then. I think wanting to belong somewhere is such an universal theme. Any child can relate to that. TUAW: What kind of development effort in terms of hours did it take to build this book? Stone: I think it took me about 40 hours, max. I polished the story and shared it with a couple of friends. Then I found an illustrator, Joyce, and we met a couple of times where she showed me some sketches. Then I connected with Lauren, the ASL storyteller, and we did the whole video shoot in less than three hours in her living room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I sent a rough edit of the video to Joyce and she did the illustrations based off Lauren's telling of the story. The illustrations took about a month and half. That was the longest part of the development process--waiting for them to be done. When I got them, it was just a matter of cleaning them up, adding them into iBooks Author along with the video, laying them out just right with the text and changing the text to match the video and the illustrations. I showed a PDF version to a few people for edits, and then publishing. I started around the middle of February, I think, and finished in mid-June. TUAW: Were there any lessons you learned specifically about shooting video for inclusion in an iBooks Author product? Stone: The interesting thing about having an ASL component is that you can't go back and reshoot the ASL - the signer will look different; the lighting will be different, and so forth. So whatever footage I had, I had to make sure that the English text matched it. There's one part in the book where the ASL version and the English version of a specific sentence are on separate pages. It was a goof made while shooting the video, and I tried to change the English text to match, but it didn't quite work. But that's okay. What is significant in one language may not be as significant in another language. English and ASL are different languages with very different storytelling and cultural properties. But one big lesson I learned - I edited it all in iMovie '09 (or is it '10? whatever the latest version is) and exported it to HD format using Media Browser in the Share menu. Much to my surprise, that format is not compatible with iBooks Author. I had to compress and convert it to "Apple TV" format with a data stream of 2 MBps in 720p - which was perfect. I used MPEG Streamclip. This discussion thread helped a lot. So - that was a big surprise for me - that iMovie couldn't easily export to a format compatible with iBooks Author. No biggie, though. TUAW: Do you worry about the product size? It's over 100MB, about 116MB if I remember correctly, but I think you nicely avoided the problem of a product that was too ginormous. Stone: I knew video would make the iBook big. I experimented with different data stream rates, basically 1 MBps, 1.5, 2, and 3. I found that 2 was perfect. I also wasn't sure just how big the image files could be; each page has about a 1.5-2 MB PNG file for the illustration. TUAW: Did you ever consider doing this project as an application instead? Stone: I have zero app programming skills. To do so would incur lots of overhead costs and stuff like that. I didn't have time for that. I knew all I wanted to do was make a book and iBooks Author fit the bill. I know of other teams working on ASL/English storybook apps, though. Of course I would love to make the book as interactive as I can: let kids play with Pointy Three, move it around the screen and fun stuff like that. But iBooks Author is strictly for making books with interactivity that is very boxed-in in the form of widgets. I see that at the end of conventional iBooks from major publishers: the very last page has a nice widget where you can immediately give a star rating and write a review. I tried to research on how to do the same thing for my book but couldn't find the solution. So my implementation is very clunky: a hyperlink to the book's iTunes Store page. TUAW: Are there any other features you'd put into future books? Stone: Since publishing, I've got some feedback that sound/reading aloud feels missing from the book. People have gotten accustomed to children's books on the iPad speaking aloud. My book is silent - like a normal book, and like any other book I read on the iPad - I'm deaf so reading is always a silent experience. So I didn't really think about that until some people told me they wanted the book to talk aloud to them, too. I'm still researching on how that works. It's not a native feature of iBooks Author, but I heard people have found ways to add read aloud to iBooks. But it sounds difficult. And you know what...it' s interesting because Apple has built in voice over. Why can't Apple allow iBooks readers to access that directly? Seems simple. TUAW: Any more thoughts you want to add about this project? I loved doing it. I want to do more. Surely this isn't Pointy Three's last adventure! Most of all, I hope others do it as well. I told some people, "If you can put together a Powerpoint, you can do this." That's how easy it was. If people are interested in adding ASL support to their books and want to hire me, you can reach me at my blog or Facebook page. I also hang out on Twitter. TUAW: Thank you for taking the time to chat!
Erica Sadun06.29.2012iBook Lessons: BookWidgets
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Developer Niels V. has been hard at work developing customizable HTML5 widgets for iBooks Author integration. He and his partner started working on this project when iBooks Author first debuted this past January. Since then, their iBooks Widget creation tool has matured (although it is still not quite ready for sale) and the first book using this technology is now for sale in the iBookstore. The book in question is Ranching and Reading by Dr. Marti Dryk. It's a reading comprehension and vocabulary text. Dr. Dryk's publisher, Bruce Brown of E Skills Learning, contacted Niels after discovering his tool. He was looking specifically for a quiz widget that allowed students to send results to their teachers. Unfortunately, although iBooks Author offers a built-in review widget, it does not provide any communication capabilities. Student answers and performance cannot be sent to teachers. Previously, Brown and his colleagues were involved in publishing education apps. They decided to test out the iBooks waters. "Ranching and Reading" was their first entry into an iBooks alternative to applications. Their primary hurdle, however, was what Brown called "accountability." He explained how teachers needed to know how the students performed on the iBooks quiz. iBooks Widget's quiz widget seemed to be a perfect match. This widget creates quizzes with a variety of question types (including multiple choice, text answers, and picture ordering) and report results to the teacher. The student can immediately review which questions he got right, but he cannot modify his answers. The quiz widget is just one of about eight or nine widgets that Niels has been creating. (He's still in the process of creating more.) Other standouts include an image carousel with Google Maps integration, an interactive graphing plot generator, and an embedded streaming YouTube widget. Although the focus to date has been on education, these tools can be used in any genre of books. The widget creation tool remains in private beta, although Niels has been working with customers like E Skills Learning who have contacted him through his web page. "We're waiting to see how the tools mature," he told TUAW, "to decide when we do our product launch." He does not yet have a fixed date to offer. He invites interested parties to contact him on the website landing page. Niels is responding to queries as he receives them. In addition, he points to his free guide about creating interactive books in iBooks Author. If you sneak a peek at Chapter 6, you'll find a deployed preview of several of these widgets. The goal is to deliver a creation tool that lets you pay (using a credit-based system) to build watermark-free and royalty-free widget exports, which you can then fold directly into your iBooks Author creations, and then upload to the iBookstore without further payment.
Erica Sadun06.26.2012iBook Lessons: Can an iBooks-only strategy work?
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. One question I keep encountering is this: "If iBooks Author is so great, can I make enough money selling only through Apple and only to iPad owners to stay in business?" The answer to that is that results will vary. Can you add enough value in an iBooks Author presentation to justify leaving out a large segment of the ebook market? Using proprietary formats, the iBooks Author app allows you to lay out your books and add custom elements in ways that go well beyond the EPUB standard. Your books look exactly as you intend them to; you can build interactive widgets that leverage the power of HTML and Javascript for new kinds of interaction. This extended standard means that iBooks Author excludes Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook platforms, and it also cuts away anyone who might purchase and read your ebook on an iPhone or iPod touch. iBooks Author in its current state is Apple only and iPad only. [Note that you're free to repurpose your text, images and other content for those other platforms if you want to build Kindle/Nook-friendly editions. The iBooks Author licensing agreement says you can't sell the output from iBooks Author anywhere but the Apple iBookstore, but your content is yours and you can use other tools to build for other ebook platforms. –Ed.] That's not the entire picture, however. For some authors, specifically those creating highly-interactive titles, their choice hasn't really been about Amazon-or-iBooks, since standard EPUB represents a fairly static output technology. Their decision is more about choosing between an iBooks Author ebook versus a custom, standalone iPad app. I have encountered book creators who have gone in both directions. iOS development house Tapity chose to go iBooks. Founder Jeremy Olson told me, "To build an interactive digital book, our choice of platforms was really straightforward. Kindle doesn't yet allow the kind of rich interaction that we were looking to build so it was really between building an app versus building an iBook. When iBooks Author was announced in January, the choice was a no-brainer: It's pretty simple: cost to build, time to build, price you can charge, and less competition." Tapity's first entry to this field was Cleaning Mona Lisa. An interactive iBook, it introduced readers to painting techniques and the need for restoration. Host Lee Sandstead offers a series of enthusiastic lectures about the topic through embedded videos. Interactive widgets guide readers through virtual "cleaning" exercises, revealing the hidden colors and details hidden by the debris of time. "As a team of creatives, building Cleaning Mona Lisa with iBooks Author cost us next to nothing but our time," Olson said. "Just a few thousand dollars. I expect building an app with the same kind of user experience could have cost us close to a hundred thousand dollars to contract out the programming. This makes building iBooks far less risky than building apps." He pointed out how effective this choice was. "Programming a project generally consumes half or more of the development time. With iBooks Author, we design it and it's done (apart from just a few small HTML 5 widgets we had to program). This also cuts out the process of designing something in Photoshop and exporting it for use in an app." Going iBooks also helped sustain the book's bottom line for sales. "With apps, $2.99 is a premium price. With books, folks expect to pay more and so $2.99 was an extremely reasonable starting price for our book. With future books we think that we can even charge much more. With higher prices we don't have to worry about the volume so much." Monster Costume CEO Kyle Kinkade opted for a custom app instead. Having debuted in the ebook scene with the highly popular Bartleby's Book of Buttons, Monster Costume is known for producing high-quality, extremely interactive titles with a strong attention to detail. "We do books as applications," he explained, "Because, frankly, there's no platform that's mature enough yet to support the kind of interaction we create. If iBooks Author could produce the level of what we wanted it to do, we'd use it in a heartbeat. The problem is that it can't handle the demands we put on an interactive book." For Monster Costume, iBooks Author's Keynote-esque toolset -- intended for ease of use and book production by non-programmers -- doesn't deliver the level of interactivity or customizability needed. The company builds its own proprietary book development tools in-house. "We can handle logic way better than iBooks Author, and we can handle high-level scripting," Kinkade said. "We provide finely detailed interaction as well. We can adjust ourselves and our engines to a much higher level of graphical horsepower, too. In comparison, iBooks doesn't provide the horsepower or the finesse that we need for our projects." Monster Costume is currently working on The Adventures of Tyler Washburn. Kinkade told TUAW, "For Washburn, the title we're building now, we just couldn't have done it in iBooks. That degree of graphics and interaction simply does not exist in the tools that Apple has provided." Economically, building in-house tools has been an investment in the future. "The cost of development for our engine was extremely high," Kinkade explained. "Using that engine for future titles will be at a far lower cost now that we've created it. We are in talks with various content producers and publishing companies right now to license those tools, to let them do what we do." Choosing to go in or out of the iBookstore represents another point of difference between developers. For Olson, iBooks is a positive. "The iBookstore is a new marketplace and iBooks Author books are an even newer phenomenon. That means that Apple loves to promote great examples of innovation on the platform and it's easier to get on their radar. It also takes fewer sales to get high up in the charts," he said. "So did we make the right choice? Absolutely. No regrets. Our iBook peaked at the #12 book in the iBookstore and was the #1 app in Arts & Entertainment for over two weeks. Sales are definitely not on the same scale as the App Store but they don't have to be because we charge more than what we would for an app and sales are good. We think we can find ways to make these iBooks even more efficiently and you can definitely expect more iBooks from us in the future." Kinkade prefers the App Store. "We've found that the iBookstore gets way less traffic than the traditional App Store. So we get the advantage by positioning our books with the apps. The only negative is that it's harder to get featured as a book in the App Store -- although we did. It was just hard as hell."
Erica Sadun06.17.2012
iBook Lessons: Style sheets
One of the challenges Steve Sande and I face, when building our ebooks, is to present our manuscripts with reasonable typographic flair. That's harder than you might first think because readers can customize many ebook features, including fonts. In iBooks, they may choose sans-serif Seravek over, say, serif'ed Palatino. Instead of worrying about particular font mixes, we found we needed to concentrate more on the layout geometry. These issues included relative font sizes (e.g. how the heading font size compared to the text font), indentations for lists and notes, in-paragraph spacing that controlled how dense each paragraph was wrapped together and between-paragraph spacing. Over time, we've evolved our in-house style sheet to define how each of these elements are laid out in our ebooks. Our latest effort, Pitch Perfect (left) looks a bit different when compared to our first ebook, Talking to Siri (right). We've gone a lot bolder with our font sizes, are using hues for subtitles (the Siri fonts are all solid black), and have tuned a lot of the layout. For example, we increased the paragraph to paragraph spacing for easier reading. We have developed these styles in Word and Pages, where you can tweak each of the paragraph characteristics and save them into named styles. In the following screen shot, you can see our basic paragraph characteristics, defining how stretched our characters are (not at all), the spacing between lines, and how much padding to add before and after the paragraph. When creating standard ebooks, these characteristics form the basis for ereader layout. It's then up to the reader app, whether iBooks, Kindle, or whatever, to decide how to finalize the presentation. You don't have a lot of say on the ultimate way the page will be seen by the reader but you can express your preferences for relative differences. Apple's iBooks Author changes that approach around entirely. By extending the EPUB standard to their own proprietary ibooks format (adding XML namespaces and CSS extensions), Apple has allowed authors finer control over ebook layout. When you create a book with Apple's tool, you're ensured that what you create is what the reader experiences. The following screenshot is from our iBooks-only title Getting Ready for Mountain Lion. Each typographic and visual element was laid out precisely in iBooks Author. From page breaks to figures to text, we could exactly preview each page as the reader would see it. What's more, Apple provides six high-quality style sheet templates for you to work with. You do not have to design your own styles to create eye-catching, beautiful manuscripts. Just choose an existing layout, and work from there. We did extend Apple's "basic" style template for "Getting Ready" because we used layout elements (such as in-text notes) that went beyond Apple's layout vocabulary. We also tweaked some of the styles we were given, including the blockquote element, to better match the way we were using our examples. iBooks Author allows you to save your customizations for re-use (File > Save as Template). The third party app Book Palette ($9.99, shown below) provides 20 custom templates built in this manner. Book styles range from cookery to business writing, brochures to glossy product overviews. The limits with Author, of course, are that you cannot distribute paid content outside of the iBooks store, that you cannot distribute to other platforms like the Nook or Kindle, and that you cannot create versions for iPhones and iPod touches. Author is iPad-only, Apple-only, iBooks only. For those reasons, when we had to choose which avenue to develop Pitch Perfect with, we decided on a standard EPUB. This allowed the book to be read across the iOS platform line, and on the Kindle and in Kindle apps. After using iBooks Author's beautiful layout tools, it's hard to go back to Word and Pages but it's a place that, for now, better serves our layout needs for a larger potential market.
Erica Sadun06.08.2012
Cleaning Mona Lisa: Bringing iBooks to a new standard
TUAW was treated to an advanced look at a new iBook from Tapity. "Cleaning Mona Lisa" offers all of thirty-odd pages of content. Of those, perhaps half are a gallery of pictures. Those numbers are deceiving however, as the application's video content, gorgeous imagery, and interactive widgets -- not its page count or its text -- drives the book's narrative. Launching at US$2.99, Cleaning Mona Lisa is hosted by Lee Sandstead, "the worlds most fired up art historian," according to Tapity's press briefing. I found his video snippets thoroughly engaging as he introduces readers to the technical story behind art masterpieces. The book explains how painting technique, from egg-based tempuras to glossy oils, evolved to try to define the "HDTV" of the 1500's. You see how careful restoration removes the haziness of years to bring back the colors, textures, and details originally created by each artist. The book is a perfect introduction for young readers as well as adults. Its mix of videos, custom interactive widgets, and light reading cover the topic in a way that's sure to create a new audience of art enthusiasts. Developer Jeremy Olson of Tapity was kind enough to sit down and talk with me about the genesis of the book. He explained how inspired he was at the Apple Design Awards he attended a few years ago. While picking up his own ADA for Grades 2, he discovered Push Pop Press's "Our Choice," an interactive book. When Apple released iBooks Author this year, Tapity decided to test the waters. Approached by numerous potential partners, they decided to embrace Lee Sandstead, to build a new kind of storytelling, "that engages and delights on every page." Olson found that content partnership leveraged with a lot of elbow grease could let them see if iBooks would provide an alternative development platform. "Developing iBooks," he explained, "involved little more than the cost of our time. We put in hundreds of hours on this project." Olson guesses that using iBooks Author offered them a factor of "5, 6, or even 7 times improvement" in man hours versus developing a traditional iOS application. This project represents a big experiment for Tapity. "If anyone likes this book, if it's successful, it could end up the iBooks poster child for success. If any independently published iBooks Author book is going to make business sense, it would probably be this one. So far we have made connections with Apple and have had a good response from the press." Olson hopes the book will find an audience and offsetting those hundreds of man hours with enough sales to allow them to move onto further iBooks projects. Tapity already has additional content providers waiting if Cleaning Mona Lisa sells well. "This is a partnership deal," he explained. "People are coming to us with content, looking for a way to publish it. We'd like to do more of these ibooks and become more of a product company." As for the future of iBooks, Olson added, "We feel that traditional publishers are missing a big opportunity for playing with this platform." Would Tapity consider moving to other platforms like Android? "Honestly? We're really not that interested," Olson said. "We're focused on Apple. That's where we know people and where we know the culture." As for those people who buy Cleaning Mona Lisa, Olson hopes they walk away from the book having been inspired by its lessons. "Our technology is engaging," he said. "It should not distract because in the end, the book should be the content. Our readers should be impressed by what they've learned, not just by how we presented it. "The most challenging part is putting all of that together in a purposeful way to make every page engaging and fun. A lot of iBooks we saw used the technology just for the sake of technology. Widgets seemed arbitrary. We wanted everything to add to the narrative and I think we accomplished that." Cleaning Mona Lisa is now available for sale in iBooks (US$2.99). It can be read on iPads only.
Erica Sadun05.29.2012
iBook Lessons: Book samples and rookie mistakes
iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Talk about rookie mistakes! We finally discovered the reason the iPad-only iBooks Author version of our Mountain Lion ebook got stuck on its way to release: we hadn't submitted a custom sample along with the full ebook. Every iBooks Author submission requires a sample book for paid book accounts: "[A] custom created sample...is required for all Multi-Touch books offered for sale in the iBookstore" For further details, Apple has a support article about publishing requirements here. So we went ahead and created our sample. To do this, you duplicate your book to a new project and then delete all non-sample content. Removing chapters is easy: select them, click delete. It's a little more complicated for in-sample chapter-text. You must edit the actual content. Make sure you delete the text and images you want gone, and then trim away any remaining pages. It took us a number of tries to get this right because we thought we could delete pages directly by selecting them and clicking delete. You can't. Pages only represent layout, not content, and our undeleted content kept popping back at us until we figured this bit out. Once the project was trimmed down to size, we saved it and exported it to an .ibooks author file. We then bundled the full and sample versions up through iTunes Producer and re-submitted to iTunes connect. The multi-touch book went live in the store instantly upon uploading the sample version. One of the reasons this process went as quickly as it did is that Apple has apparently been conducting its own internal audits, finding books that have been submitted to the iBookstore but that haven't gone live yet. Support requests like ours trigger a list of issues that need addressing. We now wish that we had contacted Apple sooner, rather than falling into the "we have no control or say in this process" mindset. Of course, Apple could have simply sent a robo-email telling us that the iBook needed a sample rather than making us wait two weeks to find our mistake. Deciding what to include in our sample led a bit of debate. We weren't sure whether to include an entire section (which we weren't sure would work out of context) or bits and pieces from all over the book. In the end, we settled on distributing our preface, which includes overviews of each of our chapters and our intro-video, which welcomes readers and explains the purpose of the book. For a larger book, we think we might have gone with a full sample chapter instead. We couldn't find much online discussions about choosing material to include in a sample. (We're used to Amazon and iBooks deciding that for us from our EPUB.) To this end, here's what we felt would be relevant to creating sample content: It should reflect the writing style of the authors, to give readers a sense of the flow and pace of the text, and answer the question "Does this author's voice match the way I want to read?" It should reflect the contents, showing readers some of the scope that the book covers, "Am I interested in this material? Does it have compelling utility?" If the book has a particular flow, for example lessons, it should showcase that style, "Can I follow along the way this book is teaching me based on this sample?" Beyond those few thoughts, however, our immediate push was to get a sample created and submitted. I'm sure if we had spent a little more time and effort, we could have expanded these ideas further; maybe if we ever get around to writing "iBook Lessons" as a standalone book, we'll flesh this out. For now, we got past a hurdle we weren't aware even existed, and learned an important lesson about being proactive with support requests. Hopefully our rookie mistake will save you some wasted time and effort. Do you have thoughts about creating ebook samples to share? Or examples of your own rookie mistakes? Drop a comment and let us know.
Erica Sadun05.23.2012
Hello iPhoto for iPad & iPhone is an amazing new way to learn
If there's one thing about iPhoto for iPad and iPhone that I've never been too happy with, it's that the apps aren't exactly self-explanatory and Apple doesn't provide much in terms of an onboard guided tour. Long-time Apple developer and publisher Saied Ghaffari has just published a new iBook titled Hello iPhoto for iPad & iPhone (US$1.99) that provides a unique way of learning the tricks of iPhoto for your iOS device. I had the opportunity to talk with Saied recently about the book, which was created in iBooks Author and has been featured by Apple in the iBookstore. He's no newcomer to the how-to book market, having created the popular "It's About Time: Learn the Switch to Mac" application that led a generation of switchers to the OS X platform. That app made it into special bundles with Parallels Desktop as well, providing a way for switchers to painlessly make the way between Windows and OS X. Times change, and now Saied has embraced iBooks Author and created a helpful companion to the iOS version of iPhoto. Once purchased and downloaded to your iPad, the book appears on the shelf in iBooks. With a tap, it opens to a gorgeous photo of the Grand Canyon -- an image repeated on other chapter headings. In the lower left corner is a small thumbnail that opens a launch page when tapped. %Gallery-155531% The launch page provides a portal to learning a bit about iPhoto and iTunes on your Mac, iPhoto on your iPad, or iPhoto on your iPhone. Tapping any one of the images on the launch page takes you right into that specific book chapter. Going to the iPad chapter brings up three more images, any one of which can be triggered with a "tap to learn." The main topics are an Overview of iPhoto, Browsing & Sharing, and Editing. If I select Browsing & Sharing, for example, I see a more focused page with descriptions of two lessons -- one for Browsing, one for Sharing. With a tap on either description, I'm into the lesson. Once you're at this level, the document is readable in the usual "swipe to turn a page" manner. This is where Saied's experience in computer-based training really shines. Through the placement of small "magnifying lenses" on the page, your eye is drawn to a feature of iPhoto that you're going to learn about. Saied then takes you through a succinct written description of the feature to accompany the images. To be honest with you, I pretty much ignored iPhoto for iOS until I read Hello iPhoto. In the short amount of time that it took for me to go through the book, I was able to pick up a lot of hints and tips about iPhoto for iOS that I wasn't previously aware of. I feel that the $2 price tag of the book is a perfect price point for Hello iPhoto, as it definitely provided much more value in terms of a learning experience. If you have purchased iPhoto for iOS, but still find yourself not using the app all that much, you owe it to yourself to buy Hello iPhoto. It will get you up to speed on iPhoto in no time at all.
Steve Sande05.16.2012
iBook Lessons: Using Book Proofer to preview EPUB files
iBooks Author is an amazing tool for laying out and publishing ebooks to iTunes. Unfortunately, the application creates books that are only readable on iPads. You trade off fantastic page design (via Apple's proprietary .iBooks format) for a much smaller potential reading audience. When you want readers to be able to peruse your book on iPhone, you'll need to go with EPUB format instead. For all its faults, Pages still offers the best tool for creating compliant iTunes EPUB submissions that pass submission validation. Steve and I have been hard at work on a couple of books, preparing them for submission to Amazon and iBooks. Our workflow starts with writing and editing in Microsoft Word. This allows us to use Word's collaboration and revision tools to produce a file that can be submitted directly to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. For all that we yell and complain about Word, it's still the most powerful tool in our arsenal for manuscript preparation. From there, we move to Pages where we mark out sections (Inset > Section Break, File > Save). This is an important step we've learned. Sections allow us to use images throughout our entire document. Otherwise, images are limited to 11 megabytes of unencoded data per section (or "chapter" in Apple's documentation). Pages omits those extra images during EPUB creation. Careful section insertion bypasses that issue. From Pages, we export to EPUB taking care to check our primary metadata: publication name, author credits, and genre. Once exported, this is where a great new tool from Apple becomes part of our flow. Book Proofer (now available from your iTunes Connect author account) allows you to sync and preview EPUB files. Just as iBooks Author lets you sync and preview iBooks files, Book Proofer does the same for EPUB. Drop a book onto the wooden shelf at the top of the app, select a device to sync to, and it opens in iBooks, ready for inspection. Unlike the iBooks Author version of this functionality, Book Proofer syncs with all iOS devices, not just iPads. Be aware that you still need to have iBooks open on-device as in the iBooks Author version: Once synced and open, we check for formatting issues, inspect our images to make sure they all made it through EPUB conversion, and perform a final sanity check. From there it's time to make any final metadata updates in Calibre before we submit to iTunes and begin our weeks or months long wait for approval. While Apple's iBooks Author has received all of the attention in the press lately, the company also deserves a lot of credit and kudos for developing Book Proofer as a tool for working with EPUB files.
Erica Sadun05.16.2012