How to Use iBooks Author

iBooks Author is relatively quite an easy application to start working with, this is because it is quite similar to the way that the application Pages works in terms of the way that it handles text and images. Of course, with iBooks Author you do get a number of extra facilities, such as the ability to add interactive widgets to your book. It seems to me that iBooks Author is desktop publishing, grown-up. It is fairly amazing at what you can do in this free application to create electronic publications, that used to be quite difficult to work with in the past, with applications such as Quark and PageMaker. It is very easy to add text and to add the styles to that text so that you have a very professional looking book, that looks good from start to finish. By using the styles for the text you can ensure that the way a chapter title looks on page 1 of your book, is exactly the same as how the  same type of text element will look on the last page of your book.

iBooks author to make textbooks

The iBooks Author software application is perfect for making textbooks. You can see this quite clearly when you look into the templates for iBooks Author that come with the application. The software gives you plenty of opportunities for setting out a well laid out textbook with chapters, sections and pages. Your chapters can have sections and pages, but you can’t put chapters inside of sections. Just some common sense rules to help you organise your electronic textbook to best advantage for the viewer or reader. One of the particularly good points of the iBooks Author for educational purposes, is that you can add review interactive widgets at the end of a chapter or section, that the reader can use to assess whether they have read and understood that part of the book fully. It’s like a little test and is perfect for study purposes.

The Apple iBooks ePub format that comes out of iBooks Author also gives the reader of the book excellent facilities for notation and personal markup of the text. A reader is very easily able to add a note that can be viewed at a later stage, for example at revision time. This also builds upon the authored glossary which is another educational feature of the authoring process in this e-books authoring software. When you’re writing your book and you want to have a word or a passage of text that has extra information for the reader, you can easily set that text to have a section in the glossary.

Great application to use on your Mac to create iBooks. They will only play on the iPad and it can be difficult to get them into the Apple Store if you want to sell them but still a large enough market for it to be worth while doing.

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