Mac20Q Podcast 124 – Looking in iBooks Author

My week as a Mac user, or should I say my week as a Apple aficionado. I’m still enjoying using Siri first thing in the morning to get the day started. I like to have the iPad beside the bed with me at night time. I was able to thoroughly amuse my wife this morning when I asked Siri “Who is the fairest of them all ?” And Siri told me of course – You are the fairest of all my friend.

[Tweet “Is iBooks Author the best book authoring software?”]

iBooks_Author

Ninety Days Exclusive with KDP Select

This week I’ve spent an awful lot of time sitting at my desk staring at my iMac and in particular looking at Scrivener. This is because I am full on with my writing of books at the moment. When I get started with something I like to totally immerse myself and I don’t get much time for anything else. Last week I put out the Geek Photography book onto Amazon and it will stay just on Amazon for 90 days because I went with the exclusive deal that you have with KDP Select. My next book, the one that I’m working on now is the Good and Geeky Writers Workflow and I am painstakingly going through the editing stage. If I had the money I would pay for an editor to edit the book, although I would probably still find a couple of typos even after that. Small typos and spelling mistakes are notoriously evil and wicked in their behaviour and some will always remain hidden long after you think you have got rid of the last one. So that is what I’ve been doing for the last few days, going through the text line by line, reading it out aloud in hunting mode. I also find one or two sentences here and there that need to have a little bit of a tweak. So hopefully the book will get better bit by bit and will soon be ready to send out into the world. This second book I plan to send to more online bookstores. I’m not going to go for the exclusivity with Amazon for the first 90 days and so I will need to get this book into iBooks author. [Tweet “iBooks Author is so stylish when it comes to making books”]


Get Bonus information about iBooks Author in this PDF Book

iBooks Author bonus

Click on the book to get bonus material about iBooks Author.

Includes links to loads of video tutorials about making eBooks


iBooks author is marvellous

I haven’t looked into iBooks author for quite a few months and I was pleased to see that there is a new import facility where you can bring in a complete e-book in the EPUB format. The last time I tried to import into iBooks author I was having to do it one chapter at a time. That was a little bit tedious to say the least. Mind you, I can see that the look and the format of the book in iBooks author will be very different from the Kindle book. The Kindle book is straightforward text with a few pictures, whereas the iBook will have much more of a design. I’ve checked out a few good-looking iBooks and they look so great in comparison. I would feel cheated, not to mention cheating the readers, if I didn’t do something similar with my book. The ability to have blocks of text placed exactly where you want them on the page and to have other callouts where you put supporting text alongside the main text looks great. The placement of pictures works out better in iBooks as you have the same sort of control as you would have in a PDF document.

Get the iBooks Author PDF with more information and links to a pile of video tutorials about making eBooks.

iBooks Author is super to work with

The tools for working with the text in iBooks author are really very useful indeed. For example there was a piece of text that I wanted to change to a specific style. I didn’t want to change the text itself to something different I only wanted to change the style. I was really pleased to find there was a way with the find and replace tool that allowed me to select every occurrence of that text within the document and to just change the style.

Good and Geeky Writers Workflow David Allen Wizardgold


Book_Cover_Geeky_Writer

Being stylish in iBooks Author

The styles that were created by the export out from scrivener worked out well but I think I’m going to have to spend some time creating my own template within iBooks author. Probably the best thing to do will be to use one of the templates already there and to customise it to my preferences.

A page turner

To a certain extent when I’m reading an iBook it feels a little bit weird because I’m used to having the nice page turning effect. I like just tapping on the right side of the screen and the page turns. In iBooks I am having to do a slide across from one side to the other and it feels a little less book like. But then again, I just had a look at another book in iBooks and it does do the page turning effect. So I will have to find out how to flick that switched to make it work.

Embedded Videos

On the Kindle side of things I can have links to videos and the videos will play within the Kindle application on my iPad. This works out pretty well as it keeps the reader within the book. I see that on the iPad you have a choice of a link to the video which takes the reader out into the YouTube application, or wherever the video is displayed. The other choice is to embed the video within the book and the reader stays in the iBooks application and this is preferable.

Interactivity

Overall, the what I can do with the iBooks is better because the book looks better and has a number of other interactive multimedia features. After starting to do some work with the book in iBooks author I can see that it is going to take quite a bit of time and effort in designing the book to be exactly the way that I wanted to be. It is going to be worth it in the end. I am actually looking forward to spending some time working with iBooks author. I am hoping that the publishing process is going to be as easy as it was with the Kindle book on Amazon. I think they make it now so that you don’t have to have an ISBN number which was a little bit of a sticking point before. Maybe you need to have an ISBN number for print books but for electronic books it really isn’t necessary. Now I think the ISBN system is a little bit of a scam.

Writing

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