iBooks Author for Board and Picture Books
In this How to Use an iBooks Author Template series of tutorials, we will learn how to customized an iBA template with your own text and illustrations and publish to the iBooks Store.
Many of my BellaOnline readers have questions about using iBooks Author for a fixed-layout book in landscape orientation, especially for an early reader board, picture or first chapter book. As iBooks Author was originally a software for creating reflowable text books, these authors have found it difficult to make iBA bend to their will.
However, with the latest update, iBooks AuthorR has made some concessions to these authors. It’s now possible to force a landscape only orientation for your book and because the portrait orientation is disabled, the text and illustrations can be fixed on the page. This is important for total control over the placement of design elements and text on a single page basis.
With these new features, I decided to convert my two book apps to digital books using iBooks Author. I soon realized that I needed to do more than just import the illustrations and text. Every feature of the book apps needed to be evaluated as to how best to be used in the iBooks Author software.
After over two and half years of development, the result was an iBA template for creating books that have a lot of pictures and small amount of text. Besides the retina-ready, full bleed, fixed layout format, I’ve tried to include the features most requested by my readers. A few of these are audio narration on the story page, an activities section for interactive games and videos, a quizzes section for learning widgets and an appendix for everything else. Now that iBA gives the option to have a video or a widget play automatically on the page, it’s much easier to create an app-like ebook with iBooks Author.
We will use my template for the examples in this tutorial series, but you can follow along with any iBooks Author template. We will go step-by-step through the process of creating a book in iBooks Author, with your own illustrations and story text.
As we build your book, I will discuss the reader-requested features that I have included in my template and how to achieve the same with another template, if possible. When you are ready, we will publish the book to the iBooks Store.
Many of my BellaOnline readers have questions about using iBooks Author for a fixed-layout book in landscape orientation, especially for an early reader board, picture or first chapter book. As iBooks Author was originally a software for creating reflowable text books, these authors have found it difficult to make iBA bend to their will.
However, with the latest update, iBooks AuthorR has made some concessions to these authors. It’s now possible to force a landscape only orientation for your book and because the portrait orientation is disabled, the text and illustrations can be fixed on the page. This is important for total control over the placement of design elements and text on a single page basis.
With these new features, I decided to convert my two book apps to digital books using iBooks Author. I soon realized that I needed to do more than just import the illustrations and text. Every feature of the book apps needed to be evaluated as to how best to be used in the iBooks Author software.
After over two and half years of development, the result was an iBA template for creating books that have a lot of pictures and small amount of text. Besides the retina-ready, full bleed, fixed layout format, I’ve tried to include the features most requested by my readers. A few of these are audio narration on the story page, an activities section for interactive games and videos, a quizzes section for learning widgets and an appendix for everything else. Now that iBA gives the option to have a video or a widget play automatically on the page, it’s much easier to create an app-like ebook with iBooks Author.
We will use my template for the examples in this tutorial series, but you can follow along with any iBooks Author template. We will go step-by-step through the process of creating a book in iBooks Author, with your own illustrations and story text.
As we build your book, I will discuss the reader-requested features that I have included in my template and how to achieve the same with another template, if possible. When you are ready, we will publish the book to the iBooks Store.
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