Hands On: Apple’s iBooks Author App

Apple is hop­ing its new iBooks Author app will turn edu­ca­tors into authors, the same way iMovie and Garage­band turned ama­teurs into audio and video edi­tors.

Apple launched the app at its edu­ca­tion event in New York City in con­junc­tion with the revamped iTunes U and part­ner­ships with var­i­ous text­book pub­lish­ers. The goal is to increase the iPad's role in the class­room.

Although poten­tial­ly any type of book can be cre­at­ed in iBooks Author, the focus is clear­ly on edu­ca­tors and text­book mak­ers. We spent some time using the pro­gram — which is best described as Keynote for eBooks — and are impressed with the early results.

Tem­plate Brows­er

TEMPLATE BROWSER

Just like Keynote, iBooks Author comes packed with a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent book tem­plates that authors can use as a start­ing place to design their books.

Click here to view this gallery.

The pro­gram inter­face will imme­di­ate­ly be famil­iar to any­one who has used Apple's excel­lent pre­sen­ta­tion appli­ca­tion, Keynote. It's easy to dis­miss Keynote as just anoth­er pre­sen­ta­tion tool — or Apple's ver­sion of Pow­er­Point — but the truth is, the pro­gram is much more pow­er­ful than that. Using Keynote, pre­sen­ters can craft full mul­ti­me­dia pre­sen­ta­tions. Inter­ac­tion and web design­ers have even turned to Keynote as a fully-fledged wire­fram­ing tool.

In addi­tion to Keynote, iBooks Authors also has a hint of InDe­sign thrown in for good mea­sure. Users can import chap­ter text from Word or Pages doc­u­ments direct­ly into the app. Still, from our use, the lay­out options real­ly seem best designed for books that rely heav­i­ly on mul­ti­me­dia and less on lots and lots of text.

The most com­pelling part of iBooks Author is the wid­gets fea­ture. This allows users to insert dynam­ic ele­ments into pages, includ­ing photo gal­leries, movies, full Keynote pre­sen­ta­tions, inter­ac­tive images and 3D objects. Using var­i­ous actions and lay­out options, other ani­ma­tions and pop-ups can also be cus­tomized in the app to offer a rich expe­ri­ence. Users can even code their own HTML wid­gets to dis­play cus­tom con­tent.........

http://mashable.com/2012/01/19/ibooks-author-app-review/