Hands on: iBooks Author review

Hands on: iBooks Author review

Apple's latest content creator is designed for a very specific audience: textbook publishers. If you're looking for a do-everything app that will export in every conceivable file format, iBooks Author isn't for you - for that you'd be much better off with Scrivener. If you want to make eye-popping textbooks for the iPad, however, iBooks Author makes it exceptionally easy to produce very high quality stuff.

Getting started is simple

The first thing you'll see after the licence agreement - more of that in a minute - is the Template Chooser, which looks exactly like the one in Apple's iWork apps. You have six templates to choose from, and you can export your own projects as templates for future use or unlock the templates' various component parts, fiddle with them and then save the results.

Once you're in the program proper, you'd be forgiven for thinking you're in Pages. The two programs are very, very similar, with a sparsely populated toolbar at the top, pop-up Inspector, Media, Colors and Fonts panels and sidebars for viewing thumbnails and managing styles. It's very easy to use, and the thumbnail navigation - which you can expand and collapse by chapter or by section - means you're unlikely to get lost.

As you'd expect from an Apple product, the templates are very, very good and you need to try very hard to make a bad-looking textbook. As with Pages, previously invisible guides appear to help you get your images, text boxes and other items just-so, and the styles-based formatting means you can quickly change something and apply it to the entire book. In addition to normal text you can add boxouts, shapes, tables and charts, and the new Widgets button adds interactivity.

As Widgets are written in dashcode - the same language used for OS X's Dashboard widgets - we should soon see a wide selection of add-ons. For now, the choices are a photo gallery, an embedded media file such as a video or audio file, Q&As, Keynote presentations, interactive or 3D images, and HTML code.

EASE OF USE: Images don't do justice to how ridiculously easy iBooks Author is to use. You need to try very hard to make a mess

Changing appearance and behaviours is just a matter of bringing up the Inspector palette and choosing the appropriate options.

Importing and previewing

iBooks Author has not been designed as a writing environment: the idea is that you write your book first, and then bring it into Apple's program when you want to make it pretty. Word and Pages are the obvious candidates for the writing bit, but for complex jobs we'd suggest having a look at the wonderful Scrivener too.

You can bring text in in several ways. You can type directly into the documents - you can enable editing of placeholder text in Preferences - or you can drag in a Pages or Word document. The Word import is particularly good, bringing in the text and applying appropriate styles without any obvious messing around, although as you might expect, bringing in anything more complex than text, such as documents containing embedded images, tends to throw the layout out a bit.

STRAIGHT FROM WORD: Importing even enormous Word documents is almost instant, and iBooks author does a good job of applying appropriate styles

Once you've got your text you can bring up the Glossary toolbar, adding new entries as you go, and you can then switch to the Glossary view to cross-link entries and add definitions.

The final stage before publication is to make sure that your iBook actually works. Using the Orientation buttons to switch between portrait and landscape mode is essential, as some bits of the template designs disappear completely in portrait mode, and if you've got your iPad handy you can preview the book in iBooks. You need iBooks 2 and a USB connection for this. It doesn't work on other iOS devices or over Wi-Fi.

Publish and be... damn!

There's more to iBooks publishing than simply clicking the publish button. You need to have an ISBN number for your book, which costs money; you need an iBookstore seller account, and you need to submit your book for approval via iTunes Producer. It's a bit of a hassle, especially if you're not resident in the US, as you'll need to get a unique reference number from the US taxman, the IRS.

iBooks Author is a very capable program, but it's not for everybody. Your books work on iPads but not iPhones, and they won't work in the previous version of iBooks. There's no versioning or collaboration tools for keeping track of successive drafts, edits and others' input, so if you're working in an environment where lots of people are involved in book production iBooks Author probably isn't for you. And there's that licence agreement.

The iBooks Author end user licence agreement says that if you're charging for your book you can only sell it through iBooks; if you fall foul of Apple's approval process, you're not allowed to take your finished project, export it and sell it elsewhere.

CONDITIONS: Apple really doesn't want you to use iBooks Author for anything but iBooks - it reserves the right to tell you to get stuffed.

We're sure it'll be technically possible - the underlying format is EPUB3, albeit a slightly tweaked version, so converting it shouldn't be a tough job, and you can export as PDF too - but the end user licence forbids it. That means you could put in months of work, only for Apple to say no. When you consider the time and effort involved in making even a simple book, that's a level of uncertainty publishers really don't need.

We've got another concern about the approvals process: what makes the cut? Bear in mind we're talking textbooks here: will Apple check every fact? Will it approve books espousing Intelligent Design? Will everything have to be of the highest quality, or will iBooks become stuffed with crappy book apps that bring back the bad old days of interactive CD-Roms?

So is iBooks Author any good? If you're happy with Apple's terms, and if you don't mind having to use different programs if you're publishing to other stores, then it's a very fast and effective way to turn text into something more interesting. It's too simple for major projects, we suspect, but it does what it's supposed to do very well.