Today, at the Apple Education event, held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Apple announced a new feature for Mac owners who want publish get their books on the iPad. The new tool, “iBook Author” will allow authors to create interactive works for publishing on Apple’s new iBooks 2 platform.
Armed with the new app, users will be able to choose from a template to create their books (much like the wizard in Microsoft Word) allowing them to drag and drop elements into the page and position them with ease.
Similar to Keynote and Pages, authors can embed galleries and elements, but also include JavaScript and HTML5 code, providing them with the ability to deliver truly custom content from their computer or the Web.
(Image Credit: The Verge)
The application supports interactive glossaries and provides a slick iPad preview feature, which can show what the book will look like on Apple’s tablet device without having to publish it or port it across.
After the impressive demo on stage, Apple’s Phil Schiller notes:
“In like 5 minutes flat, we created an e-book and deployed it to the iPad. I hope you find that as inspiring and empowering as I do.
So now you’ve seen, anyone can create interactive books. You can start with customizable templates, you can create multitouch widgets, you can extend that experience.”
The app will be made available later today, free on the Mac App Store.
Want to know more about online education? Read In 2011: How the Internet Revolutionized Education.
It lowers the bar for teachers, educators and students to publish their own work. You can already do that with a PDF and LULU and equivalents and make it web native and open. You'll need specialist skills to get beyond text and a video - but that may be enough. But try and export it to something else - might as well write a page in HTML5 using Popcorn... This doesn't really revolutionise anything at all in terms of teaching and learning. I could use it to show the mechanics of how firms invent value streams from closed systems - that would give insight perhaps...I love Apple stuff but this doesn't even have collaborative features built in. If you want textbooks to be truly revolutionary make them iterate and be dynamic - use the power of the web to connect people to co-construct and reflect on knowledge. This is, honestly, taking one medium and inventing another electronic version in its own image with a bit of tweaking - a blind ally - I could give you 50 more ways in which I could make the whole concept of webbooks more interactive and engaging...Let's hope they make the next version that bit easier to co-construct knowledge with and to reflect on.
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LikeThis doesn't move the needle for writers much. Novels, stories, and comics dont need interactivity.
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LikeAt its launch I was really excited about ibooks as I had not jumped on the kindle bandwagon and was intrigued about interactive books and perhaps the new dawn of hypertext fiction. However, I immediately jumped into iBooks and found a lack of (free) content and what content was available was not very interactive at all. I am hoping that by now opening up the flood gates of content via this app that the content will start to flow and people will turn to it as a means for self-publishing interactive novels and magazines.
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LikeWill it export or is this solely for the iOS platform because editing for kindle and nook sucks but once you edit for one you are pretty good for the other. I haven't published on iOS just because its so different.
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LikeWow... the world will be flooded with "done in 5 minutes flat" ebooks... truly amazing.
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LikeIf these creations were available to people who don't use ipads, iOS, I'd be fully on board and running with it. I'd buy a Mac this afternoon and start creating custom content for the schools and organizations I work for and are involved with.
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LikeiBook looks like a great app. However it is only available for Mac os x 10.7. (Lion) So us Snow Leopard users will have to make do with Pages! Bummer.
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LikeShare Ross That's not cool, but Apple being Apple, will always get away with little or no explanation.
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LikeI just checked. It's not available yet.
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LikeMichael Durwin Its available now.
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