Comments on: Proposed session: iBooks author

By: katherinemcnamara.writer

katherinemcnamara.writer — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:46:46 +0000

Aimée: to change the fill color, you should be able to do it with the Inspector and also the Fonts tool. It works pretty much the way formatting Pages works. // There are various user sites, just google (though no doubt you and Lauren have done this).

On another note: my brother, Brian McNamara, is an astrophysicist at U Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute, and head of grad physics. Nice coincidence. I look forward to meeting you.

By: katherinemcnamara.writer

katherinemcnamara.writer — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:41:27 +0000

Aimée, Maria Langer (www.mariasguides.com/) sells (5 bucks) iBooks Author: Publishing your first E-Book, in the iBook Store. Chapter 3 is called Adding & Formatting Texts, and is a freebie. (I’d attach it, but think we can’t.) You can distribute your book as you like (even as a pdf) as long as you don’t sell it — if you sell, you do it through the iBook Store (Apple’s EULA). Size is limited anyway for the iBook Store; you can put it in Dropbox, Public Folder, and let them download it. I’ll add another commet about changing color, and more.

By: ahm

ahm — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:36:37 +0000

Thanks for the link, John — I’ve downloaded the book and hope to peruse it this afternoon.

Katherine, your project sounds great! I’d love to see it!

My talented RA, Lauren Burr, has put together a list of known issues that she’s run up against, specific to our project, or maybe more general. They are:

Portrait layout:
– missing text boxes (ie. “exercise” bubbles)
– missing non-gallery images
– images along margin instead of in the main text
– blank space where page jumps
– lack of pagination
– weird subheading formatting (black bars)

Customization of Templates:
– how to change backgrounds of chapter splash pages? (because – – drag-and-dropping a background colour would be stupid!)
ways to make more aesthetically pleasing “exercise” bubbles? (rather than coloured text boxes)
– how to make more interactive “widget” exercises that are not multiple choice? (notes page? iTunes U? Other?)

Publishing:
– how to distribute to class without access to the iBookstore?
– potentially giant file sizes

By: katherinemcnamara.writer

katherinemcnamara.writer — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:46:52 +0000

I’d like this. As a publisher, I’m using iBA to design a book of poems, with author’s readings over animated text, possibly a video, and images of the physical volume, an artbook to be pubished at the same time. Am also working on a demonstration of my to-be-digitized archive of the Dena’ina Athabaskan author Peter Kalifornsky. Could bring some show-&-tell.

By: Phil Edwards

Phil Edwards — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:05:00 +0000

+1 to this session idea/notion/proposal. 🙂

By: johnpwalter

johnpwalter — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:04:41 +0000

I’d be interested in this. I recently upgraded to Lion in part so that I could start playing with iBooks Author. I’m not sure how good it is, but a few days ago I saw that O’Reilly Books has a free ebook *Publishing with iBooks Author: An Introduction to Creating Ebooks for the iPad*: shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025597.do