MOBILE

A New Leaf (Part 2)

12/28/2012 8:58:30 AM

iBooks Author now optimises media for playback on the iPad if it’s unsupported on import. This could be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, you don’t need to create iPad-compatible files before importing them; on the other, some users have complained of degraded video quality once videos have passed through the app. Apple says videos that meet the iPad’s playback requirements on import won’t be re-processed, and that certainly appeared to be the case with a test video that we exported to Adobe Premiere’s iPad- compatible Apple TV 720 profile.

The publishing process has also been updated. The basic rules remain the same: if you want to charge for a book made with iBooks Author, you can only publish it exclusively on the iBookstore. But it’s now easier to do so, because a Publish button walks new users through the process of creating an Apple developer account and installing iTunes Producer, the free app you’ll need to prepare content for submis­sion to the iTunes Store. If you’ve already published books with version 1, you won’t learn anything new from the process, but it’s a good example of Apple using iBooks Author to make the whole publishing pro­cess more accessible to non-professionals.

New to iBooks Author, and the iBooks platform, is the idea of book versioning. Previously, if you published an iBook, then decided to change something, the only way to do it was to create an entirely new book, publish that, and take the old book off the Store, no doubt to the chagrin of those who’d bought the first, flawed edition and were now faced with spending more money for the fixed version or putting up with it.

This didn’t suit publishers either, because they had to use up another ISBN (at just under $15 each) for the new ver­sion. Now, iBooks Author 2 allows you to create point versions of your books and update them on the iBookstore in the same way iOS developers can push new versions of an app to their App Store users for free. It’s a cheaper way of ensuring readers have the most recent, best-performing version of your book, and updates don’t need a new ISBN.

While these enhancements are very welcome, iBooks Author is still far from perfect, and some bugbears remain that get in the way of the production process.

For one thing, previewing your book requires an iPad. That’s annoying if you don’t have one, but anyone producing iBooks seriously should expect to need access to the target hardware so that they can check user experience and perfor­mance. So it’s not necessarily regrettable that Apple forces you to use an iPad for previewing, but what’s frustrating is that the process of exporting a book to an iPad takes time, and you have to do it again every time you need to re-check some­thing. It would be useful - and presumably technically possible for Apple - to include away of previewing a book on your Mac screen without needing to hunt down an iPad, plug it in and sideload a book onto it.

Perhaps in the interests of keeping its tanks off Adobe’s richly manicured lawns (and vice versa), Apple still doesn’t permit the creation of periodicals in iBooks Author. There’s no way at present to create an iBook and then sell it on the iOS Newsstand. You could create an iBook, then put out periodical updates to it, but that wouldn’t be much like a magazine model. At the moment, iBooks Author remains wedded to the creation of books with single ISBN numbers, rather than catering for publishers wanting to put out new content every week or month.

It’s easy to imagine magazine pub­lishing appearing on the list of features for inclusion in the future, and with the big players in that market beginning to look as if they’ve decided not to bother offering affordable services to smaller publishers and dabblers, that could be a very interesting direction. However, there are customer and edition management issues with periodicals that Apple may not be willing to handle for free.

All in all, this is a very good update to a groundbreaking if flawed app: the new features are logical and well implemented, and will allow book creators to produce richer, better-looking titles on the world’s biggest mobile platform. If you dare to think different from Apple’s approach you’ll run into the occasional roadblock, but this is the simplest and most econom­ical option, if not always the best, for creating your own fixed-layout iBooks.

Portrait templates

Portrait templates

You can now create ‘Portrait Only’ books that give you complete control over the appearance of pages in that orientation. But the ‘Landscape with Portrait’ options (allowing your readers to rotate the iPad while reading for the alternative view) still limit how much you can customise your portrait pages, to the inevitable frustration of iBook creators

Scrolling text boxes

Scrolling text boxes

Text boxes can now contain more copy than will fit within them, allowing readers to scroll through. Scroll bars are of the standard Apple disappearing variety, so you may need to design in a hint to the reader that they can drag to scroll

Popovers

Popovers

These look very neat, and can be customised to an extent; but you can’t pop out large images, and iBooks Author has a tendency to add scroll bars where you didn’t want them. Using a section of text to trigger a popover requires a workaround

Publishing tips

Publishing tips

If you’re doing it for the first time, the process of signing up to be an iTunes seller and getting your iBook uploaded to the Store isn’t straight­forward. A new step-by-step guide in iBooks Author 2 walks you through it to make sure you get there safely

Video import

Video import

If you import footage that isn’t already encoded for iPad, iBooks Author 2 will do that for you, while (in theory) leaving alone clips you’ve already converted. Users get a timeline scrubber, as well as the basic play/pause button, to control playback interactively

Layout controls

Layout controls

Unlike this chap, iBooks Author is reluctant to adapt itself to suit your preferences. While its purpose is essentially to create fixed-layout books - unlike standard ebooks, where the text reflows according to the reader’s settings, not the designer’s - it still forces a certain number of decisions on you, particularly in publications with both landscape and portrait layouts

Font handling

Font handling

At last, you can pick any font available on your Mac (as long as it’s OTF or TTF) and use it to design your iBook; iBooks Author will embed the font data on output, and because it’s protected against being extracted and re-used by readers of your book, you shouldn’t need additional licensing. Do check the licences of the fonts you’re planning to use, though

 

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