Travels with Scott

After a brief hiatus, finally back at work and finishing up my first book using Apple’s new iBooks Author digital publishing platform. As this project winds down, a few new issues (for more writings on iBooks Author, head to the Digital Publishing section of the blog) have become evident.

First, as shown in the screenshots below, the audio controls differ markedly when switching between the portrait and landscape orientations. I prefer the portrait view’s smaller controller size and would love to be able to use that controller in both views. Unfortunately, if it can be done, I’ve yet to figure out how.

Second, if you look closely at the two screenshots, you’ll notice the portrait view has the recording I made for “during midnight” (a common Korean-English expression discussed in this book on Konglish). Unfortunately, the recording disappears when the book is switched to landscape view, a problem that happens at least one other time in the book. Despite deleting and reloading, plus numerous other attempted workarounds, I’m unable to fix the problem. This leaves a reader using only landscape view deprived of the book’s full content. I’m not sure why this happens, but it shouldn’t.

UPDATE (JAN 2014): I just published another ebook, this one heavily focused on images, and found little has changed over the past couple of years – Apple’s system is still far and away the easiest to use, resulting in a smoother, more appealing final product. Unfortunately, as before, IBooks Author only works on Apple products and proved essentially useless for developing a Kindle book. Given that my sales on Amazon dwarf my sales on all other platforms combined, this is a significant drawback.

In the end, given the project was for an image-focused ebook to be delivered via Amazon and Apple’s bookstores, Creative Suite wasn’t necessary. I used iBooks Author to create a book with a fairly sophisticated, magazine-style layout for iTunes. Then I took the text from that book, pasted it into a Word doc, then added back in the images, to create a book with the layout of a middle school English paper to use on Amazon. The easiest method would have been to just write everything in Word, but the Apple system is so simple to use, and looks so much better (at least for an image-heavy book), it was worth the extra work. The end result however, is readers using a Kindle will have a clunkier experience than those using an iPad or Mac.

UPDATE (29 JAN 2013):If you’re publishing for an iPad-only audience, a class or work team where everyone owns the device as part of the project, then iBooks Author is far easier and quicker for creating new content, especially if it contains video or audio. Even existing content can be easier to route through Author than the Adobe suite, unless you’re a skilled Adobe user with content already set up in one of the suite’s programs (e.g. InDesign, Dreamweaver, Captivate, etc.).

If you’re publishing with the intent of maximizing sales however, the market for Author-based books (iPad only) doesn’t compare with the reach of the Adobe tools (iPad, plus iPhone, Kindle and Nook, Windows, Blackberry, and, oh yeah, the entire Android universe). The upfront time to learn InDesign and the rest is considerable, but so is the advantage in market size. Plus, converting from a book/publication to an actual app is possible with the Adobe products, should you so desire (i.e. you’d like to include audio or video in your book, which is still a no-go for most e-readers but normal in apps). Again, it’s not easy, but it’s possible. With iBooks Author, it’s not possible to sell/distribute outside of books on the iPad .

While my personal experience is hardly the sole measure of iBooks, I sell more in a few days on Amazon than a month on iTunes/iBooks (plus there’s no irritating little “i” in front of everything). So, before you start development, carefully consider your goal for the project. If it is to distribute to a team of iPad owners, and/or you’d like to relatively quickly and easily include audio or video in your publication, iBooks Author is the natural choice. If your goal is sell to the widest possible audience, then, no matter how easy it is, Author is not the best choice. You’ll either need to dive into the Adobe morass (though the advent of Creative Cloud at least makes it cheaper than before), swear off the entire non-iPad world, or wait and hope Apple someday updates Author to allow for publishing to other platforms (to shouts of joy echoed around the planet).

UPDATE (23 OCT): My ‘pre-jinx’ from yesterday appears to have worked – Apple just announced an update to iBooks Author, which should address some of the issues mentioned below. I look forward to downloading and testing the latest version as soon as it’s available.

UPDATE (22 OCT): iBooks Author came out in January and, except for a quick update right after release, we’ve seen no updates since. If the software is going to become a legitimate competitor to the Adobe suite, instead of just another “hobby”, Apple needs to up the pace, at the very least by addressing the bugs outlined below. If not, between the bugs and the limited, iTunes-only publishing option, Author is quickly going to wither on the vine – an outcome benefiting no one outside Adobe.

Previous postings focused on initial impressions from working with Apple’s new iBooks Author and on the challenge iBooks Author (hereafter just called Author because I’m tired of typing the little i in front of everything) may eventually pose to Adobe, especially to Captivate and elements of Creative Suite. This posting takes a more direct look at comparing Author with Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite.

First off, Author is completely free, both to download the software and with no additional per book up-charges, aside from iTunes’ normal cut. Though the included templates are still limited, additional third-party templates are becoming available for purchase, including Book Palette in the App Store and from iBooksAuthorTemplates.com (well done on being the first to jump on that URL). As mentioned in previous postings and reader comments, the software still has bugs (e.g. quizzes, Help Center, odd layout issues, oversized audio playback controls, etc.) but is intuitive and easy to put to work.

UPDATE (10 March): Narration capability? There really isn’t any. While the OS has a built in text-to-speech reader, this is English-only on the system I’m using to write my current book, meaning it only reads some of the words. Given the book I’m writing is partly in Korean (and I’m sure I’m not the only person writing a language book), having the system skip whole phrases and sentences as it reads is less than desirable and makes QCing my work a hassle. Being able to add my own narration would make for a more educational, friendlier, and less robotic product.

Using widgets, I can add audio files, but the amount of space the player takes up is too large, at least for my purposes. All I want is a small play/pause button next to a headline, and the option to have the audio start automatically upon page load. If someone would like to listen, they have that option, if not, I’m not wasting a lot of screen space on an unused player.

I may be the only person on the planet who likes Adobe Captivate’s built-in voice recording and editing features, functionality I would love to see incorporated into Author, along with the smaller player mentioned above. This would allow me to do most of my work in one program, plus build in an unobtrusive option for sound/narration. Instead, as it stands now, I’ve got to use another program for creating and editing my sound files, then paste them into Author (an admittedly easy process), then devote a relatively large section of the screen to a player some or most readers may never use. Not optimal, but forgivable in software as yet only two months old.

Help Center? As you can see from the screenshot, there appear to be some issues with Help Center integration. You can still read enough to get the info you need, but this is obviously not what you want. Hopefully, this will get fixed quickly in a future release.

[ORIGINAL POST] Here are a few initial impressions after three weeks working with Apple’s new iBooks Author program:

• First off, it is very intuitive and easy to use, almost like something designed by Apple … oh, right.
• Why is there no option to view the book on a computer? If the books created by the program are meant to be textbooks, then presumably students are going to use the books for reports, and therefore want to copy and paste citations directly into a paper, not retype things they saw on their iPad. I get it that the software is meant to help sell iPads, but it seems overly restrictive to prevent textbooks from appearing on computers. Hopefully this restriction will soon go the way of the old ‘no iTunes on Windows’ idea.
• The existing templates are nice; adding more in future updates would be even nicer.
• As an author, I’d like to be able to preview the book, especially the widgets used for quizzing, on my computer without having to hook up an iPad every single time. Why not have an emulator allowing writers to see/test their book, preferably on all versions of the iPad, without having to track down and hook up a version of every last one ever manufactured?
• Why no option to print? This is an issue I also have with iBooks in general, plus Kindle and Nook. If I, as an author, have no problem with someone printing out my work, and the purchaser/customer would like to print it, who is Apple/Amazon/B&N to prevent that? I would specifically like to make a book with handouts available for teachers to print, copy, and distribute to students – why can’t I do this? And yes, I get it that handouts are not required if everyone in class has an iPad, but that classroom is not my reality.

I’m sure I’ll discover more issues, both good and bad, as I continue to work with what appears to be a great addition to the writer/publisher toolkit. I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for reading; feel free to put your comments below.