iBooks Author

iBooks Author is a free app for the Mac that let’s you (or your students as a classroom project using the iMacs in the library) create professional and interactive ebooks that can be read on the both the iPad and Mac using the iBooks app (or exported as an ePub or PDF for sharing through email or Google Drive).

iBooks Author is similar in design to something like Pages, and you construct your book from text, images and other resources – the big difference being the layout of the document and the interactive elements you can add. It’s basically a much more advanced version of the Book Creator for iPad.

When you first load iBooks Author you can select from various template designs for your book:

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And then edit the document by replacing the template content as well as using the various text, shape and formatting options in these toolbars:

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With additional formatting and design options available within the inspector:

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As you build up your content you can start to add new pages, chapters and sections to create the structure of your book (from which the books contents page will be automatically created):

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Finally, as mentioned above a big feature of iBooks Author is the ability to insert interactive elements, including review quizzes, which are accessed from the Widgets drop-down:

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If creating an ebook with, or for, your classes is something you are interested in, you can download iBooks Author using this link and it is installed on all the iMacs in the library. You can also view Apple’s help guides here and we recommend this quick start ebook and this more detailed publishing ebook from O’Reilly Media.

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