Making Photo eBooks in iBooks Author

[sbay]

Over this past summer, one of my projects has been to create a photo book in Apple's ibooks author software and upload it to the itunes store. Ibooks Author is an e-book layout application by apple and the primary advantage is its file format which allows precise fixed layouts and dynamic widgets (such as image galleries). Prior to IBA you needed create a dedicated software app to get similar functionality. The main drawback is that the file only works in ibooks2 (i.e., ipads only).

My book can be found here: Prague: A Photographic Guide . There are screenshots so you can get an idea of what you can do even if you don't have an ipad.


I'm happy to answer any questions about it, but I do have some tips/lessons learned if you are thinking about going this route:

• Do all of your content creation outside of ibooks author (writing and image prep). Resize and crop your images before loading into IBA as it has very limited image manipulation ability.
  
• Full page images should 748 x 1024 pixels in dimensions. If you show them full screen and borderless they should be 768x1024 (i.e. without the status bar at top). Double the resolution for retina display images
  
• I often use smaller images which when touched expand to a full screen borderless. Use the gallery widget with 1 (or more) images for this purpose.
  
• If you are used to working in powerpoint layout will take getting used to. In ppt you can drag and drop slides and text boxes anywhere. In IBA you can't arbitrarily take a page and move it anywhere. Sections can be re-ordered within a chapter but you can't move a section from one chapter to another
  
• There's very restricted ability to crop images. Best to make gallery widgets with all horizontal or all vertical images.
  
• Linking to a url from an image is not possible. But you can create hidden text on top of an image that is a hyperlink.

Stephen

[jimsloan]

Thanks for the info will have look into this