NOT USER FRIENDLY

I gotta say, I’m big into Apple’s stuff, and their programs. I use Keynote, Pages, Numbers and others on a near daily basis. iBooks Author takes few if any of the user friendly options from those programs. Things don’t import well from any program, and once you have it imported, get ready to learn a whole new piece of software ripped straight out of the 90’s. It’s twitchy, it’s tempermental and it’s counter-intuitive at every bend.
Here are a few of the pains:
Pinch to zoom… NOT
Apply formatting to all… NOT
Adjust formating in Auto-populated text boxes… GOOD LUCK! You have to trick it into doing what you want on a page by page basis.
The format tool bar is gone in place of an inspector window that will play with lots of things on your document. Watch it carefully, it will make changes that you had no idea it would do!
Want a 2-line chapter title with a return in it so you can decide where the line break is? NO WAY!!
Remember those shortcut keys that you used in every other program? Half of them are gone, the other half, you have to define for iBA to understand.

There are some good things about iBA, but the other reviews have covered most of those. I’m disappointed in Apple on this one though.

AmpedAndy about iBooks Author