iBooks app is a great read for iPhone and iPad; enjoy your reading material as it is easily accessible and always available. Download the iBooks app from the App Store and fill your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad library with books from the iBookstore. Take your collection with you, where ever and whenever you want. iBooks Author is the amazing app that allows you to create wonderful multi-touch textbooks for iPad. We have discussed about these textbooks in the previous post as well, so our regular readers can skip first part in this post. iBooks author lets you play with the built-in templates. Building a book is like a drag and drop activity now. Tap it to customize it. Add widgets to add spice and interactivity in your iBook.
Multi-Touch Textbook:
Considering the textbook dilemma that paper book is always expensive to produce and difficult to carry around, and the fact that new generation is grown up completely immersed in technology they should have a new type of textbook, Apple has transformed traditional paper book into Multi touch Textbook. This type of textbook is fun to read and students will be able to enjoy their courses will full interest. The images are no more front image or cross-sectional view; rather you can view each and every section of the 3D image. Printing a colorful image is costly and to make a book cost effective it is often tried to include only most important images and the rest is advised to be searched on internet. But, with this new type of textbook you can enjoy as many images as you want and can even interact with them. Interact with the image galleries; Oh GOD! How amusing it would be to read social studies and history now… you will skip the text and will dive directly into image galleries which will be far easily memorable.
Start with the Templates:
As with all other applications; Apple provides built in templates for the iBooks author as well. Don’t feel scary of this new type of app, visit the template section and select one to begin with. You can select from a variety of layouts or create your own. Why don’t start with a template and customize it as per your needs, until you get what you have planned for your iBook? McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt — the publishers responsible for over 90 percent of K-12 content — have created Multi-Touch textbooks available now from the iBookstore. Check there free download samples available and get to know what’s going in the market.
Creating Documents:
Type in the text or add your Microsoft Word or Pages documents to the Book navigator and add it as a new section. iBooks author let’s you format your document, just like any other word processor. You can add text, shapes, charts, tables, images and effects to those images. Play with the alignment options and enjoy the advanced layout options. Drag and drop images and allow the text to flow around it. This is just a beginning; iBooks author allow you to create multi-touch text books and have many more options for you.
Add Widgets:
With iBooks Author, books become an experience! You can add a number of widgets to infuse the interactive magic into your book. There are no more three separate categories of text, audio and video lectures; put them altogether in your iBook. There is indeed a long list of widgets and you would love to check them all. Starting with the most dominant attraction; the interactive 3D images along with the captions. It is not just a single image, but you can swipe through an entire gallery of images with your finger.
Callouts and pan-and-zoom features make your experience even more amusing. Insert media i.e. audio or video movies and make the material more understandable. You can also include presentations with custom animations; so books on communication topics will be really effective. Now, the last available widget; ‘HTML modules’ are opening the doors of unimaginable creativity. Well, this is what I was personally looking for; create html widgets with Apple’s Dashcode or any other Dashboard widget editor. This is doubtlessly, good news for all developers who want to pack up their widgets at one place and sale it.
Publish your iBook:
When you have finished building your book, preview it on your iPad. You should now think of distributing your iBook; submit it to iBookstore or share it on iTunes. If you own or control a catalog of content for digital distribution; you can reach out to millions of potential customers by selling your content on iTunes, the App Store, the iBookstore, and the Mac App Store.
Stay i-tuned! Stay blessed!
About Rahmeen Ahmad Khan
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