Upon hearing about the release of the new Apple publishing platform, iBooks Author, we were very excited about the potential and capability that we all now have. If you missed our initial take, you can view it here. Since then we’ve had time to play with the publisher and become much more familiar with the platform and its capabilities. We are now more excited than ever!
Getting Started
Like many of you, we have lots of content and things that we’ve written in Word. After choosing a template, we imported our Word file directly into the app. This could not have been easier. iBooks Author took our Word document, analyzed it and created the basic layout for our book. From there we were already about 50% done. The bulk of the work after this was moving content around and creating our chapters and sections. There was some busy work to ensure that the font was all the same size, style, etc. That didn’t take long though and we were very impressed with the ability to recognize section and chapters from our simple Word document. That made things so much easier as we were starting out.
Creating the Book
As we continued to move our content around and play with the layout to make it just right we found that it was much easier than expected. No advanced skills or knowledge were required. Adding video and other widgets, such as quizzes or photos, was easy and very friendly. It was almost too easy and you have to be careful not to get carried away and create distractions from the content. Once the main pieces of content were in place we added some hotlinks to our specific webpages for easy access. Embedding things like links was very simple too. The platform is so easy to use and manipulate that you really are bound only by your imagination.
Lessons Learned
We did learn a few things that can benefit you as well. First, there aren’t many tutorials or detailed support logs yet. While the platform is really easy to use and you won’t have too many questions on “how do I…”, we had questions like what kind of video can I embed, size limitations, etc. and the answers weren’t readily available. We found them but had to dig. This will go away quickly with the amount of use the platform is already getting, but it’s something to be aware of as you set off creating your books.
Publishing the book was easy but slightly frustrating. Once we pushed 'publish' we expected to see the book magically appear in the iTunes store. Okay, not really but almost. We thought it would probably take a few hours or even a day. Our first book took almost three business days. In actuality that is pretty fast, but we didn’t know what to expect so we found ourselves hitting the refresh button like a teenager on Facebook waiting for updates. We also learned that you can ‘re-publish’ or update the book with ease. Our first release was okay, but we wanted to update a few things and make some things prettier. We made the changes, saved them, published them, and within hours the book on the iTunes store was updated. Simple and effective.
Final Word
The platform is a winner in so many ways. We’re the happiest for teachers and students because they are the real winners here. This completely resets the expectation of quality materials and puts the ability to create those quality materials in the hands of anyone. The price expectation of educational materials is now adjusted, and affordable. Most content on this platform will cost less than $20, and there will be a wealth of content available for free.
One thing that we see, and we believe will change education the most, is the ability to embed HTML objects directly into the book. We are imagining the possibility of embedding highly interactive simulations and other cutting edge learning tools directly into the book making it a very personalized and effective tool for teaching and learning. Imagine a world where students want to read their book and come to class prepared with questions because they got caught up in the fun of learning. That type of engagement is all but in your hands!
You can download our book here:
