iBooks Author App Reviews

This software is amazing and one of the best things Apple ever created. The only drawback is that Windows users cannot use the iBooks that are created, and like it or not, Windows is still the dominant platform (lousy as it is). These work great on the iPad. Wonderful interface too. Wish Adobe had such elegant and simple interfaces like this. Love this software.

This is the best app ever

I have published one interactive ebook with iBooks Author, and the software was a dream to use until I installed El Capitan. Now I open the iba file I’m working with (the source file for an ebook), and it is a long time* before I can edit. I keep getting the spinning ball and have to force quit. I have tried: (a) Removing iBooks Author and reinstalling. (b) Reinstalling El Capitan. (c) Holding the shift key down when opening iBooks Author (seems to work sometimes). If you start a NEW book, you don’t have the problem. If you try to edit an old one, you get the spinning ball. ————— *I can define a “long time.” It varies.

I would like to be able to convert pdfs to epubs, so I can read them, on my e-reader, without too much eye strain. I can use Textedit to clear out formatting and [step-by-step] clear out the line breaks. I thought this would let me organize the results into simple readable epubs. But this is for fancy epubs, and this doesn’t import from Textedit, which is the best to clear out formatting, or from LibreOffice, which is my usual word processor, only from Pages or Word. I don’t see why I should need one more step in the process: pdf -> txt -> pages or doc -> epub. I don’t know about multitouch. I can’t use multitouch with my disabilities, and don’t understand why multitouch would have anything to do with e-readers.

Running into excessive lag on a high performing machine due to — I believe — the size of photos. Would love to see an “optimize photo” functionality similiar to the optimize video process that occurs on import. Otherwise, a beautifully intuitive and easy to use program with fantastic results.

iBooks Author is long overdue for an update. As many others have said, it slows to a crawl on El Capitan when opening files made in iBooks on earlier versions of OS X. The deal breaker for me is that my photos in the Photos app dont appear in iBooks Author’s Media browser, and there’s no way to drag and drop photos from the Photos app into an iBooks project. Get with it, Apple!

Really great tool that makes a lot of tasks singifiacntly easier than other programs e.g., layout, equations, formatting, publishing, adding interactive media. One big drawback that inexplicably persists is the lack of the standards iBooks page curl effect. Instead the only option is for the pages to scroll by like boards. Not a super important drawback, but a strange and disappointing one. More importantly, there’s a bug with interactive images that have a lot of annotations in them: the detail view will sometimes end up below the title-only view of another annotation. There seem to be no z-axis arranging options for the annotation elements, though there shouldn’t need to be because there’s really only one expected behavior (that the current detail view should always be top of the z-stack). Another thing that would be nice to see is the ability to properly zoom with the 3D widget. Going full screen is great, but you should be able to zoom, just like using OSX Preview on .dae files. If the above were fixed/added, this app would definitely be 5 stars. As for the issues others are having with iBooks running in El Capitan — I’m using OSX 10.11.2 and iBooks Author 2.4 and have no such issues.

Someone forgot to check if the photo import options works with new Photos application, well it does not. A known issue but taking forever to fix. Pretty much useless.

Had an epub book layed out in Pages, exported pretty well, but I wanted to tweak the layout a little. Figured iBooks Author would be just the thing. No...no, it isnt. It slathered extra pages and random SECTION X headers all over the place and it appears that you cant do such simple things as merge chapters or sections. Basically, it seems, you just pour your book into iBooks Author and it assaults your book and dumps its lifeless and mutilated corpse in an alley. I guess it works for some people, but it is most emphatically not for everyone.

I’m on my third book using this software and find it so easy to use, intuitive and a breeze. Apple has done a fine job and I can’t believe it is free.

Wish there was an ipad version of this program. Since I do so much writing on the ipad because I move around so much, it would be nice if there was an ipad version of this program. So far, I love using it.