iBooks Author App Reviews

Ive used this program now to produce almost four chapters of a fairly technical book that has a great deal of interactivity and mathematics and would like to point out several areas for improvement: 1) Equation editing and integration is poor with third party apps filling in the glaring holes but only doing so barely adequately; 2) Why are table cells treated differently from text? It is impossible to position graphics and resize within a table cell; 3) Importing and using interactive content is also not well supported and html content must be created using a bug-ridden version of DashCode. If interactivity is important to eBooks then why is Apple not upgrading DashCode to produce this content more easily? Overall iBooks Author is suitable for most simple books that have a lot of pictures and movies but producing equation-laden books with interactive content is still much harder to do than is necessary. If Apple could fix these areas, producing eBooks would truly be an enjoyable experience.

Its OK for those who cant use Page or InDesign. But when we want to make some changes or modify the template, it is not user friendly. Once in the iBook app, the result is locked to a 2-column page, no option to zoom in, and no page flip animation just the pushing function. It is a mess if we want to read the iBook on the vertical side instead on the landscape one. This app must get some major improvements to rockn roll. Dennis

I mean seriously, you cant drag/copy a single page to a different section? Cmon Apple this must be a joke

As you can see, how do you expect us to make a book like the ones in the preview pictures. I think Apple just made it look good in the pictures above, but we cant auctually make it look like that.

Program is fine if you are starting everything in iBooks Author but it wont import anything other than text, which I can cut and paste anyway. I found a format in pages that I liked but they wont import to Author. I have to do the layout all over again. ugh.

Yes, we have LaTeX equation support now! Things are getting more serious… Some fonts are mysteriously missing (most notably mathcal, although mathfrak and mathbb are there), and things like arrays are not supported. This puts a damper on a more advanced typesetting, but we are now set for basic and not-so-basic math. Both displaystyle and textstyle are supported, although the editor is not smart enough to recognize inlined formulae, so you will have to do some extra typing if you want that. Equation editor keeps LaTeX source code, so its easy to modify. I hope Apple takes a good look at MathJax, and gets a feature-complete renderer implemented for iBooks Author. All in all, a great progress compared to version 1.0 for science writers.

As pointed out by another reviewer, there are some notable math commands missing, and inexplicably mathbb has every letter except for the ones that matter (Q, R, N, Z, C). The rendering is not quite as crisp as LaTeX and its locked into a Times-like font. However, writing text mixed with equations is simply a joy compared to using Pages + LaTeXiT (and latter still works with iBooks Author for the odd cases where I need it). I havent used previous versions of iBooks Author extensively, but the current one seems rather fidgety at selecting and dragging objects. I tried many times in frustration to drag a spline handle, until I simply gave up. Other than that it works a lot like Pages, which Im happy for.

it would be great if i could view these books on my ipod because i hate taking my ipad places, it is to large. When ever i am trying to study i try to use my ipod most of the time so just for this app i went out to go get an ipad and it is just to big!

The last update has caused a major bug. (I also updated my OX S, not sure if that had anything to do with it) -It deleted 3 of my completed chapters.. All of a sudden they were gone.. I did recover 2 by clicking undo about a million times

I download this software I new this software does not support Arabic and Hebrew and right to left Languages. But unfortunately this software does not support Right to Left writing in the fields and can not select writing direction from Right to Left. It is useless for Arabic Farsi, Hebrew and all right to left languages to write in text boxes. I am a little familiar with Xcode and I know it is simple to define the text fileds for both right to left and left to right writing directions. Cocoa and Xcode has provided this facility for programmers and it is very easy. Just programmer not should prevent from this facility. Please not prevent from this ability till we can write in the text boxes from right to left.

this is a great and epic app that realy invites the auther to be creative

I really like the iBooks author software. It is easy to use and can fairly easily help you create a professional looking book with a minimal amount of effort on the layout side, so you can focus on contents. I use it to write an Academic textbook with equations, and I find the editor convenient and fast. I really like the management of cross-linking, although it has a major shortcoming : 1) it is not possible to automatically number equations and therefore cross-referencing is difficult, and 2) links and references cannot be used within the caption of Figures. I am assuming this will be fixed at some point, and considering everything else, I find these annoying but manageable. The 3D and other widgets are very nice and trivial to learn. All in all, it helps you make a great book.

With the new update, I cannot preview my work on iBooks directly from the preview button anymore. It says I need a new iBooks version. I freaked out a lot, then exported my unfinished file in ibooks file and then opened it. It worked! If this issue is not going to get corrected, it might get annoying pretty fast as some like proofreading often. I think that iBooks (and Pages-and Keynotes) should base itself more on Adobe apps that allow some compatibilty with older apps. (Save for cs6-cs5-cs4, etc). There is also Edge Reflow from Adobe that offer the possibility to preview the work on a chosen device (iPad, iPod, Mac, etc) which makes it pretty interesting as there is no need to open the actual app… There also is the problem with the table of contents that doesn’t allow you custom fonts and sizes. Along with that, for beginners, it is not possible to customize already made template (i.e. change colors of a background and keeping the texture). Another big problem with the sharing of iBooks when you do not want to publish it on the iBooks Store is the size max. of attachements on e-mail, even the apple mail. When the iBook is too big to be attached you have to open a dropbox to share it. This is very troublesome. There should be some private options when publishing an iBook so that we don’t need to use a third party for sharing. Drive doesn’t work as it compresses the file and makes it unreadable afterwards. And a minor suggestion after all that : I think that along with the Chapter and Preface option pages, there should be a Partition or Part option too such as when a book is divided in four parts, along with its chapters too.

after update to the new 2.3 version, I lost the possibility to save my iBook as PDF file - how annoying that is!

I tried to put MP4 file through iTunes,but I counldnt. The massege " QuickTimePlayerで書き出したファイルを読み込んでください” and preview was not available . I dont know the reason WHY? Please check it again and revise as soon as pssoble.

I am very excited about iBooks Author and have been using it a lot. It has a lot of promise but right now it seems very unfinished, more like a Beta than a full release version. There are a lot of bugs and a frustrating lack of obvious features. Once they fix it up I can see it becoming the default app for publishing textbooks. As it is now I would only recommend using it if you are really serious about ebook creation and are ready to deal with the various problems and frustrations.

What a lovely tool, makes gorgeous interactive books and e-learning activities. But with a closed, proprietary format. Worthless in my classes unless I buy everyone an iPad. Apple you goofed. You could have had the whole educational market to yourself--with an open standard. Instead no one is using this lovely tool.

AutherだけじゃなくてMac版のiBooksリーダーも欲しいです。

Great application for the people who want to publish iBooks. It is easy to use and your book can be easily previewed by connecting your ipad to the computer.

Greetings; Once you started to use this editorial tool, you will see that iBooks Author needs too many improvement: 1-) A few of templates! At least more advanced ones should be ready for in app purchase! 2-) Managing the Chapters & Sections is realy hard! Constant & Static Formats forcing you to follow them explicitly, it does not allow you to even change the format of the Chapter/Section to lock down single viewing angle (horizontal/vertical), changing backplane paper etc. 3-) Inserting the media widget has to be improved to allow a single files certain period/frames to be played out in book per chapter/section according to choice. Cheers fenari