Apple's iBooks Author: Pros and cons

Last week, my small publishing company released a new In 30 Minutes title that is remarkable in several regards. Easy Chinese Recipes In 30 Minutes by author Shiao-jang Kung is the first cookbook in the In 30 Minutes series. It's priced at just 99 cents, another first. It's also the first title made with iBooks Author (Apple's authoring tool for rich media ebooks) which made it possible to embed video and other app-like elements such as photo slideshows. I am going to give a short review of iBooks Author, covering some of the pros and cons of the tool. I also urge you to download a copy of the cookbook for your iPad/iPad Air/iPad mini -- it's only 99 cents, and it will let you see what the finished product looks like and how the various rich media elements work (it's also a great cookbook!)

I have known about iBooks Author for a few years, but never had to use it until now. Even though there are already many In 30 Minutes guides in Apple's iBookstore, all of them were created using other production tools -- namely Scrivener, which lets me export a single manuscript in various formats to multiple devices. This means I can relatively easily create an ebook that uses Amazon's .mobi format for the Kindle, PDF versions for on-screen reading and paperback production, and books based on the ePub format, which can be uploaded to Apple's iBookstore via Apple's clunky iTunes Producer software.

So why turn to iBooks Author? The answer: Video. I have been producing how-to videos since 2012 on YouTube, and have wanted to bring video to my titles, but Scrivener doesn't allow authors or editors to place video clips inside ebooks. For that matter, most other production tools don't either. While pundits have been talking about video and app-like functionality in ebooks for years, and various ebook technical specifications support video in theory, only Apple has actually incorporated video and other rich media functionality into its production tools. I know that video and other new features will come to the Kindle and Android e-readers in the future, but I want to start experimenting now … and iBooks Author was the only tool that allowed me to do so.

I have to admit that I was a bit apprehensive about trying the tool. It wasn't just the fact that ...

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