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Apple’s iBooks Author: the iTunes of self-publishing apps?

Ars reviews iBooks Author and the whole iBook publishing experience.

Apple's iBooks Author: the iTunes of self-publishing apps?

Apple's much-hyped iBooks Author came out a while back, and Cupertino hopes the free app can become the iTunes for the self-publishing textbook world. Available solely through the Mac App Store at a healthy 320MB, I've been putting iBooks Author through its paces in the hopes that the interactive iBook will bring me some added sales of a recently self-published e-book. I wanted to get this review out sooner, but you can't really know how well this program works unless you actually have something to publish. A bird's-eye view of a publishing tool doesn't do it justice—you have to use it in production to really see its strengths and weaknesses.

Unfortunately, I added another delay by wanting to publish my iBook before this review went live. After a week and a half, my iTunes publisher account still wasn't approved (book not even submitted yet). I gave up on that, and here we are. It seems that iBooks Author has inherited Apple's infamously slow app publishing times, so that's one mark against Apple's iBook publishing experience.

Getting started with iBook layouts

iBooks Author behaves a lot like a word processor, but it was clearly designed to make textbooks. On launch, it asks you to pick a template to use as a starting point for your iBook:

These offer a decent starting point for a variety of topics. The third option is perfect if your book is an interactive Mobil annual report from 1972. I suggest avoiding the Earth Science template unless you care for neither the Earth nor science. Once you finish your own iBook, you can save it as a template.

There isn't a blank template—I found this is kind of grating, but it ensures that your layout has all the relevant components and it clearly identifies the parts:

That's the Basic template.
That's the Basic template.

At the left are the book sections—Title (cover), Intro Media (movie), Table of Contents, Glossary, and then your Chapter and subpages. Not all of the parts along the left pane have to be filled with content—the Intro Media and Glossary are optional. But the table of contents does need to be filled out, which was problematic for the e-book I was making since it was just one section (more on that in a bit). Apple needs to give users more control over what parts of the template they want to keep. Ease-of-use and control aren't mutually exclusive features.

You can select various preset layouts for each page section by selecting the dropdown menu in the left panel:

Each chapter must always have an intro page.
Each chapter must always have an intro page.

Each part has at least one other template format, and there are various options for column layout or section styles:

Not all pages within a section need to have the same layout, so you can break up the monotony of a section by changing pages to give some nice variety. For horizontal multi-column page layouts, you can change the number of columns to add a bit of variety to the pages, and the margins are freely adjustable. It's possible to make a nice template for yourself, but I found the built-in templates a bit bland.

After seeing the myriad of sleek layouts in Lightroom 4, the lack of choice in the iBook preset layouts was noticeable. Unlike the Lightroom 4 book presets, there just aren't a lot of dead sexy page grids to choose from, and your book would feel dull if you relied heavily on what's available. Templates should inspire you to use them because they look good regardless of what's in them. Instead, you have to fight the iBooks Author templates so they don't look so dull. It's as if their designer thought, "Okay, boring school books—will do!"

Also, some preset format options aren't so helpful, and would create barely legible books. Why they even offer a one-column option for a horizontal book format is beyond me—unless the font is grade-three-essay big, you will have text with twice the recommended line length for text.

Channel Ars Technica