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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
