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Infinite Loop / The Apple Ecosystem

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

Ars reviews iBooks Author and the whole iBook publishing experience.

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.

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 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.

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45 Reader Comments

  1. some day my iBook is going to get published. I look forward to that day. I just hope my eyes still work when by the time that happens. I finished this review a couple weeks ago and it's still not up.
    13948 posts | registered
  2. BEIGE wrote:
    some day my iBook is going to get published. I look forward to that day. I just hope my eyes still work when by the time that happens. I finished this review a couple weeks ago and it's still not up.


    Keep up the faith, it's a good review (I really did just read all of it) and hopefully it will light a fire under someone's rear end in Cupertino to push the button :)
    609 posts | registered
  3. Looks like a really interesting book, too. If I had access to Maya, I'd be plopping some cash down for it. Best of luck & hope you get great sales!
    355 posts | registered
  4. Wow, no font embedding really sucks. Given that Steve Jobs was a big believer in good digital typography right from the early Apple days, this is absolutely surprising.
    1392 posts | registered
  5. It's like making it so that content on Final Cut can only be sold on iTunes.
    8 posts | registered
  6. Not really but you made some words there
    13948 posts | registered
  7. Review 1.1.

    Is the answer: A, George Bush?
    236 posts | registered
  8. > The iBooks Author file format is a binary so you can't use another tool to hack at the formatting code.

    Actually, it follows a trend with several Apple formats (Pages, ipa): it's a zip file, that contains the assets (images, videos...) and then an XML file for the text content and layout.
    162 posts | registered
  9. FatAndrew wrote:
    Review 1.1.

    Is the answer: A, George Bush?


    Oh, I think it's definitely C. Rush Limbaugh. Yo mama is definitely wrong.
    194 posts | registered
  10. So, I actually have self-published a few books. And this looks to me like it's really only for people that want to make interactive E-pubs, and even then I doubt this would be ideal for it. First it's not a great format/market/way to go, people actually do like reading words on pages for the most part unless your super-specialized. Second... the people that do need it are probably already working with more expensive/professional programs or are companies in this field. This is not something a normal (or even multi-thousand dollar a month from Kindle sales alone) self-publisher wants.

    Get a good writing program (ironically my sole reason for owning a Mac is Scrivner, a writing program I don't hesitate to recommend at every turn), MS Word for the final touches (separate layout program from your writing program), and an image editor for covers or a few internal images. You can still get on ibooks (there are other channels open to getting there, but TBH I've never seen a dime from ibooks, Amazon's more reliable there...), but also every other platform without restriction.

    It's also pretty shocking that it'd be so bad for layouts, considering I'd assume a program like this would be good for that at least, considering all the other fantastic options. If it can't do layouts better than MS Word (possible, but a pain to work with)... then just... why?

    Oh, and as for "Apple Formats" that Charles mentioned, that's the same for all the formats. Kindle is just a specially zipped html file, epub is just a renamed .rar file with .xml and such as well. Wouldn't surprise me if iBooks file is the same, probably just a modified rar/zip like the rest.
    75 posts | registered
  11. Thank you for this review. I have been working with IBA myself for a few months now and I completely agree with your assessment. In fact, the font situation is worse for me because I use a lot of maths, and there is virtually no maths support in IBA. So after thinking long and hard about it I decided to write the text in LaTeX and copy PDF images of the pages into IBA. The result is beautiful, but the e-book is now landscape only and the file size is a bit bigger than I would like. (Aside: I hope the TeX community will develop a successor to latex and pdftex that allows dynamic content for ebooks. "html5tex"?)

    Video has also been a bit of a nightmare. Many formats that normally run fine on my iPad are not supported in IBA, and this has caused me some serious headaches. It is not helped by the fact that I use Hype for my HTML widgets. While this is a great tool, it seems that the video supported in Hype is not supported by IBA and vice versa (if anyone knows otherwise I would be grateful to hear about it).

    For the interactive questions, I really miss a "reveal" option, where after submitting an answer a box will appear that explains why you are right or wrong.

    Once you do get things to work, it does look stunning, though. Especially on the new iPad.

    Finally, I must take issue with the "Apple takes 30%" complaint. I have published with an academic publisher, and the standard cut the authors get is 10% (which is then divided between the co-authors). I am positively thrilled that Apple lets me keep 70%.

    Last edited by Maldoror on Fri Apr 27, 2012 3:50 am

    655 posts | registered
  12. I created a book with iBooks Author. It's been available in the iTunes store for a couple weeks now and I'm now working on my next couple books.

    The submission and approval process is horribly bogged down at Apple right now, things are slow. It took my book about a month to work through the system, but that's faster than many others have experienced. I hope (and expect) that it will get better as the iBookstore staff ramps up to meet demand. Once the book is in the store, things are quite automatic and I am happy with the way it's working now.

    Nice review of the software, thanks for that. I've found some very frustrating limitations but nothing so aggravating as the TOC structure forced on me in landscape mode. I wrote a whole chapter on navigation for my book to help people going in the first time.
    7934 posts | registered
  13. HTML5 for me!
    +PDF, perhaps.
    1666 posts | registered
  14. darkowl wrote:
    Wow, no font embedding really sucks. Given that Steve Jobs was a big believer in good digital typography right from the early Apple days, this is absolutely surprising.

    I know designer types love them some fonts, but honestly, I find them annoying. Stick to simple, clean fonts and move on.
    6251 posts | registered
  15. Maldoror wrote:
    (Aside: I hope the TeX community will develop a successor to latex and pdftex that allows dynamic content for ebooks. "html5tex"?).


    Hear! Hear! I would love to be able to use LaTeX for everything. The lack of ePub as a destination format is really getting old.
    185 posts | registered
  16. There's one thing missing from this review, which made me want to try iBooks Author out:

    "iBooks Author can't be installed on [my iMac] because Mac OS X version 10.7.2 or later is required."

    Well that sucks! Sure, I could be running Lion on both this particular iMac and my MacBook Pro, but I still need a large number of applications that require Rosetta, and I can't afford to update or replace them all right now.

    Ah well, perhaps when I am able to upgrade, IBA will also have been updated with better fonts, support for math equations, and video in vertical-format pages...

    Edit: Oh, and the "reveal" option on test questions one of the other posters mentioned. Apple, are you listening?
    560 posts | registered
  17. DCStone wrote:
    "iBooks Author can't be installed on [my iMac] because Mac OS X version 10.7.2 or later is required."

    It's just a matter of editing a coupe plist files to make it run on 10.6.8. Do a little Google or drop me a PM for details.
    7934 posts | registered
  18. I love the ease with which I can create a customised textbook for my university students BUT then I find out that having gone through the publishing process my 'book' is only available in USA. I am not in USA and cannot access iBooks USA. So, back to PDFs .. what a pity :-(
    Michael
    5 posts | registered
  19. ^^ My book is available in 32 different countries. Was not not an option for you?
    7934 posts | registered
  20. heySkippy wrote:
    DCStone wrote:
    "iBooks Author can't be installed on [my iMac] because Mac OS X version 10.7.2 or later is required."

    It's just a matter of editing a coupe plist files to make it run on 10.6.8. Do a little Google or drop me a PM for details.


    Not much good unless there's a way to get it besides the Mac App store? It refuses to even download it to my computer, and Apple's web site simply redirects to the App store.

    Edit: Found the instructions - never mind, I'll wait for my system upgrade and IBA 2!
    560 posts | registered
  21. I'm about done on a small iBook that I wanted to put up for sale on the iBookstore. I should have read up more on how darn hard Apple has made it to publish stuff. We already have a company account registered on iTunes Connect and have released a few apps. Thus we have all the banking info done (that was a major hassle) and everything flows nicely on the app side. Now, for some idiotic reason we can not use that account for the iBook but apparently have to register some new account for the iBook thing. So, all the horrible banking setup once again as well as getting some silly US tax id (I'm really, really afraid to deal with the IRS, do one thing wrong and you're rotting in some US jail). I glanced at the docs for getting a tax id from IRS and it was horrible, didn't understand anything of it. Why do I need some US tax id for a book that's in Swedish and won't even be sold in the US, the app side doesn't need any tax ids.

    So, right now I'm really thinking about cutting my losses and take a PDF to Amazon instead. I haven't spent too much time in IBA yet (all content was written in Pages), so it's so far no big loss.

    Well, that was a rant and a bit, but sometimes Apple just fails so miserably at helping the people that actually make Apple all the money. The fact that there is no way to contact Apple and get some help with stuff makes it all the more frustrating.
    13 posts | registered
  22. FatAndrew wrote:
    Review 1.1.

    Is the answer: A, George Bush?


    It's yo mama.

    Quote:
    Actually, it follows a trend with several Apple formats (Pages, ipa): it's a zip file, that contains the assets (images, videos...) and then an XML file for the text content and layout.

    that's good to know. I'll post that.

    Quote:
    Finally, I must take issue with the "Apple takes 30%" complaint

    Did I write that? It's standard and I don't think I would have complained about it.

    Quote:
    I know designer types love them some fonts, but honestly, I find them annoying. Stick to simple, clean fonts and move on.


    I agree but even then the options suck pretty hard. Like I said in the review, I'd have been happier with one versatile font like PMN Caecilia.

    Quote:
    I love the ease with which I can create a customised textbook for my university students BUT then I find out that having gone through the publishing process my 'book' is only available in USA. I am not in USA and cannot access iBooks USA.


    I'm in Canada and the process is very straightforward to get a US EIN number. Call the number provided one one of the links from the iBooks Author documentation and you'll have the number immediately when you talk to someone. I was annoyed at this process at first but this was super easy, fortunately.

    Quote:
    Now, for some idiotic reason we can not use that account for the iBook but apparently have to register some new account for the iBook thing.


    I know - I had to use a unique ID as well. So dumb.
    13948 posts | registered
  23. I've been wondering if iBooks Author will be the new HyperCard. That is, people won't use it to "publish" but more for self tuned class notes, tests, etc....
    3816 posts | registered
  24. It's really sad that Apple has dropped the ball on typography and standards-compliance with iBooks.

    I think many were quite excited when Apple first announced it was getting into ePub (I certainly was), hoping that their involvement would energise the standard and bring benefits for all while affirming Apple's commitment to quality. There was a time when Apple's products were embraced by the creative community because they demonstrated a deep commitment to excellence in design. It's a pity that iBooks has failed to be a part of that. There's no point cataloguing all the problems here, those who have to deal with them know them well enough.

    Still, iBooks Author is easy enough to use that it'll be a help to those unwilling to deal with ePub code directly. The licensing tradeoff ('free' with restrictions) is mild enough that it's a decent choice for those who just have to get something published for cheap in a hurry.
    3543 posts | registered
  25. wallinbl wrote:
    I know designer types love them some fonts, but honestly, I find them annoying. Stick to simple, clean fonts and move on.


    Simple, clean fonts are what good typography is all about. That doesn't mean they all have to be the same, it means they have to reflect the nature of the content (and occasionally vary if that nature changes). Garamond is a good font, it's been around for centuries because it's stylish and readable, but if every book used it the world would be a poorer place.

    'Designer types' who attempt to attract attention by using a funky font are simply being onanistic.
    3543 posts | registered
  26. BEIGE wrote:
    Quote:
    Finally, I must take issue with the "Apple takes 30%" complaint

    Did I write that? It's standard and I don't think I would have complained about it.


    Sorry, I see now that it was not a complaint.
    655 posts | registered
  27. irfoton wrote:
    I've been wondering if iBooks Author will be the new HyperCard. That is, people won't use it to "publish" but more for self tuned class notes, tests, etc....

    That's what I'm using it for. Notes, labs, glossary, Khan Academy videos, etc. All in one place. Very cool. Although the math support sounds like it'll be a problem for calculus. Maybe they'll fix it before fall.
    2346 posts | registered
  28. that's interesting. I didn't try it with multiple iBooks, but can you have more than one document preview on the iPad?
    13948 posts | registered
  29. BEIGE wrote:
    I didn't try it with multiple iBooks, but can you have more than one document preview on the iPad?

    Sure, I don't think there's any practical limit.
    7934 posts | registered
  30. wallinbl wrote:
    darkowl wrote:
    Wow, no font embedding really sucks. Given that Steve Jobs was a big believer in good digital typography right from the early Apple days, this is absolutely surprising.

    I know designer types love them some fonts, but honestly, I find them annoying. Stick to simple, clean fonts and move on.


    Your lack of faith (knowledge) in typography is disturbing. 90% of all fonts are simple and clean. The guy just wants alternatives.

    The fonts that end up bundled on computers are a little weirder because consumers would not understand why there are 10 flavors of Helvetica, they only understand "different" as flashy fonts that look like bling.

    Look more closely at printed newspapers and books. You'll find that the specific fonts used contribute hugely to that publication's visual identity, harmony with the layout and overall design, readability, and differentiation without being wild look-at-me fonts.
    1470 posts | registered
  31. Ya, and book-capable fonts are another problem entirely. Helvetica is clean but it's not a good book font. It's display-only (display here means titling or signage)
    13948 posts | registered
  32. BadSuperblock wrote:
    Look more closely at printed newspapers and books. You'll find that the specific fonts used contribute hugely to that publication's visual identity, harmony with the layout and overall design, readability, and differentiation without being wild look-at-me fonts.

    I'm aware. There are several major publications whose fonts I don't care for and it deters me from reading them in print. I read them online.
    6251 posts | registered
  33. All the more reason for Apple to get decent alternatives. Which font do u recommend if you are content with the existing ones?
    13948 posts | registered
  34. I continue to be amazed that the books generated by iBooks Author can only be read on the iPad. Apple has cut off the iPhone & iPod Touch. I recognize that the larger screen of the iPad is preferable for reading media-rich books, but cutting off a significant fraction of the iOS customer base seems like a bad thing to do. I read lots of eBooks on my iPod Touch, mostly because it's what I have with me all the time.
    90 posts | registered
  35. Confused about the issues you had with video. I'm building an iBook now in IBA and have several videos that play both horz and vertical. Or do you mean they just aren't' embedded in the content on vertical. (they go to the media thumbnail sidebar to be selected and played fullscreen.)

    Do your vids have an interactive label set? that may be the difference. I found out the hard way that the only way to get several images and text box blocks to appear was to apply one of the interactive title labels (or create a custom one.)
    3 posts | registered
  36. abadidea wrote:
    BEIGE wrote:
    some day my iBook is going to get published. I look forward to that day. I just hope my eyes still work when by the time that happens. I finished this review a couple weeks ago and it's still not up.


    Keep up the faith, it's a good review (I really did just read all of it) and hopefully it will light a fire under someone's rear end in Cupertino to push the button :)


    Perhaps they are holding it until they can find a font that you like. That's what I would do if I were them. No point in pputting out something that sucks.
    46 posts | registered
  37. Good review! There doesn't seem to be mention of Highlighting, Notes and Study Cards though, which are all great features for students and which were one of the reasons I opted for iBA over QuarkXPress and InDesign.

    Biggest issues I've had till now with iBooks Author are:

    (a) Links and highlighting capability in general suddenly stopped working in landscape mode, although it all still works fine on title pages(!) and in portrait mode. Hope this gets fixed in the next version.

    (b) When Previewing an iBook, it seems like it's not just the changes from last version published that are updated, but the whole lot, making it an infuriatingly lengthy process in the case of multimedia-rich books.

    Apart from this, I think it's already a great tool for a 1.1 version.

    On the Typography front, I was pleasantly surprised to see the option to tweak Baseline Shift. It would be great if the IBA developer team could add Quark-style Baseline Grid & Lock to Baseline Grid options.

    Also, a "fit to window" and a "fit width" zoom option would be a welcome addition.

    All in all, I'm loving iBooks Author. As long as it gets its due share of love and investment from Apple – unlike what happened to iWeb (to which iBA owes a lot) – I think it's got potential to be a great tool in education at all levels, and possibly one of the single biggest reasons for mass adoption of iPads in education world-wide.
    2 posts | registered
  38. Quote:
    Good review! There doesn't seem to be mention of Highlighting, Notes and Study Cards though, which are all great features for students and which were one of the reasons I opted for iBA over QuarkXPress and InDesign.


    Highlights and notes are features of the reader, not the app. The Kindle and iBooks have those features, not Indesign itself. Unless I missed something.

    I agree about the need for a baseline grid. I thought I mentioned that but maybe it got deleted out in one of my early hackjob edits.
    13948 posts | registered
  39. I realise I didn't explain myself properly in that opening line. I am aware that Highlighting & Notes are features of the reader, but as far as I know, their handling via Study Cards is only available in books designed with iBA – but I might be wrong. Anyway, well done once again for the comprehensive review.
    2 posts | registered

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