How to Make an iBook

Make an iBook

Not long ago, writers were entirely at the mercy of the picky publishers who stood between an author and his or her potential readership. But thanks to the rise of digital books and open publishing platforms like Apple’s iBookstore, anyone can get their stuff out there and have a shot at finding an audience. And with the added interactivity of the iBooks format, authors can raise their books to a new kind of next-generation reading experience. You’d think that producing such a book would require high-level programming skills, but no--Apple has taken its trademark approach to empowering the masses with easy creation tools to digital bookmaking with iBooks Author (Mac App Store, free).

There are a couple of things you should know about iBooks Author before you create your first iBook. The application runs only on a Mac, and an iBook can be read only on an iPad and sold in the iBookstore. (You can distribute it for free however, and export it as a PDF or plain text file.) Unfortunately, the app can’t be used to create an ePub file, which is the closest thing the digital publishing space has to a standard format. Finally, iBooks Author was designed primarily for making textbooks, but Apple is always quick to point out that the app can be used to make almost any kind of book with a little tweaking.

1. Pick a Theme

When you launch iBooks Author you’re prompted to choose a template to base the design of your book on. The six stock templates were designed for textbooks, which probably isn’t what you have in mind. You can customize any of them to fit your needs, but to save a bit of time you can download third-party themes from the Mac App Store. Templates for iBooks Author, for example, offers an extra 40 templates for $4.99 that are fit for everything from novels to notebooks--there’s even a free version that gives you 10 themes. For this tutorial, we’ll keep things simple with iBooks Author’s standard Editorial theme.

2. Work with Text

Type directly into a page or drag and drop a text file into your iBooks document--it will automatically create new pages to flow all of the text into, and format the text to fit your template. Click the blue paragraph icon in the upper left to select different paragraph and character styles. Use the column on the left to view and select the various pages in your book; click the “+” at the top left to add more pages. To work on the cover and table of contents, select them from the top of the column.

3. Work with Images

As with text documents, you can drag and drop images into your pages. iBooks Author helpfully autoflows text around your images as you position them on the page, and to resize an image, you simply grab and pull one of its corners. To resize or reposition a frame and its picture separately, select an image and then click the Mask button, located just below the View and Orientation buttons at the top left.

4. A Few More Basics

Basic formatting options for text, objects, and more are conveniently gathered into the Inspector window, which can be accessed by tapping the “i” Inspector icon at the top right. In that same area you’ll also find icons to access fonts and colors. To add a new object or text box to the page, simply click their respective buttons at the top center of the main window. Layouts for both landscape and portrait orientations have to be designed individually; toggle between them using the Orientation buttons in the upper left. Pro tip: If you can’t delete something, such as a line, from the template, it’s probably locked. Simply open the Arrange pull-down menu and choose Unlock.

5. Polish Up and Preview

Add and arrange more text and images, adding as many pages as you need, until you’re happy with your book. Feel free to explore other options as you come across them, but we recommend keeping things simple for now. The steps we’ve outlined are all you need to create a basic book--something as simple and image-light as a novel shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. To preview your book on an iPad, first open iBooks on it, then connect it to your Mac. In iBooks Author, click the iPad icon at the top labeled Preview. Now your book is on your iPad, and you can carry it around with you to read and show off!

Source: http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_make_ibook

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