Now Phil Schiller is back on stage, and he’s here to tell us all how these amazing iBooks 2 e-textbooks have been created: a new app called iBooks Author, exclusively for the Mac.
Roger Rosner, VP for Productivity Software, is back on stage for a walkthrough of the new software. He starts a product using a template chooser, which allows you to then create a new document and build a book.
In many ways, iBooks Author looks just like Pages mixed with some Keynote, then slathered over with a double-plus helping of interactivity. All the controls are just simple drag and drop, allowing you to layout pages with absolute ease. This isn’t just relevant to textbook authors: this is relevant to every author who wants to do more with his book’s layout than just slam words into print. Mark E. Danielewski will love this.
iBooks Author has impressive autoformatting. One thing Rosner shows off is just drag-and-dropping a gallery into his e-book. Simple.
You can also do totally custom interactive experiences, but with no programming
“Apple built Keynote, and so we thought wouldn’t it be great to make interactive experiences without any programming?” Rosner quips. So you can import Keynote presentations into an iBook. But there’s also full Javascript and HTML5 coding support, meaning anything you can do in those languages, you can program into an iBook.
iBooks Author also allows for the creation of multimedia glossaries. You can also easily preview at any time what a book will look like on your iPhone or iPad.
“If you’ve ever been involved in an e-book creation before, you know this is a total miracle,” says Rosner. And as someone who has tried to make ebooks, he’s right.
iBooks Author is free and is available for download now.
[image via The Verge]
