Saturday, June 30, 2012

Books-O-Matic

I experimented with Apple's iBooks Author this morning.

I'm not totally sold. It's all about canned templates, and me sitting there saying "How do I change this? Is it even possible?" Then I seem to spend a long time clicking around trying to do something that is pretty easy to do in InDesign.

What is interesting, though, is you preview your iBook on an iPad that you hook up to your computer. That was cool, though it also made me frustrated as I wanted to know how to change it to single page view instead of fluid scrolling. I think the answer to that might be to make it a PDF and what the hell, just do it in InDesign.

I exported a PDF so you can view it on a computer, and not have to buy an iPad and go through Apple's store just to check it out. Be kind—this isn't edited or designed, and I couldn't figure out how to do most basic things in iBooks Author. I dragged the first two chapters of MariesWorldTour.com 2001 into it, the original Marie-leave-New York posts.

Download here. Right-click to view it in Acrobat and not the web browser, where it doesn't work right. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you're over-thinking things with iBooks Author. It might help to download some of the better interactive books to see how cool they can be.

Also, you can export your iBook and make it available to preview on your website, so we don't have to mess with a PDF.

If you just want to make an ebook, and not an interactive iBooks, try Apple Pages '09. It will create that for you and Apple has a template on their website.

Marie Javins said...

I am pretty sure I should just stick with InDesign for this, since it's the most versatile. Templates make me crazy because it takes so much time to learn how to un-make them.