Apple launched the app at its education event in New York City in conjunction with the revamped iTunes U and partnerships with various textbook publishers. The goal is to increase the iPad's role in the classroom.
Although potentially any type of book can be created in iBooks Author, the focus is clearly on educators and textbook makers. We spent some time using the program — which is best described as Keynote for eBooks — and are impressed with the early results.
Users can import text directly for a chapter from a Pages or Word file.
The formatting within that file is preserved when possible and text size and line height can be adjusted as usual.
The program interface will immediately be familiar to anyone who has used Apple's excellent presentation application, Keynote. It's easy to dismiss Keynote as just another presentation tool — or Apple's version of PowerPoint — but the truth is, the program is much more powerful than that. Using Keynote, presenters can craft full multimedia presentations. Interaction and web designers have even turned to Keynote as a fully-fledged wireframing tool.
In addition to Keynote, iBooks Authors also has a hint of InDesign thrown in for good measure. Users can import chapter text from Word or Pages documents directly into the app. Still, from our use, the layout options really seem best designed for books that rely heavily on multimedia and less on lots and lots of text.
The most compelling part of iBooks Author is the widgets feature. This allows users to insert dynamic elements into pages, including photo galleries, movies, full Keynote presentations, interactive images and 3D objects. Using various actions and layout options, other animations and pop-ups can also be customized in the app to offer a rich experience. Users can even code their own HTML widgets to display custom content.
iBooks Author is designed to be used with the iPad and published in the iBookstore. Using an iPad, users can transfer a Proof of a book to their device to view inside iBooks 2. After the user is satisfied with the proof, the book can be published using iTunes Producer directly into the iBookstore. Users can also export PDF copies of the book if they want to distribute something in a more traditional way (or need non-interactive galleys).
At the Apple event, Mashable's editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff got some one-on-one time of the creation process from an Apple professional. Check it out.
Although iBooks Author might not totally disrupt the eBook or textbook industries overnight, we think it's a great first step at making e-publishing less confusing. Lots of tools — free and commercial — exist for eBook publishing but we haven't found any as easy to use or as replete with interactive functions. The fact that Apple is offering an authoring tool — and for free — is a great start.
What do you think of iBooks Author? Let us know in the comments.
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