Hands on with iBooks Author 2.0
Originally released in early 2012, Apple’s education-themed ebook creation tool took bold steps as the first WYSIWYG ebook program to export a perfect book, just as the book's author envisioned it. As I noted in my review of that software, however, the first version of iBooks Author was very much a 1.0 product, with strange omissions and odd workflows for users who didn’t want to build textbooks. Ten months later, an updated version—iBooks Author 2.0 (Mac App Store)—brings simplified tools, new templates, portrait-only options, and a better publishing workflow to the table. Naturally, I couldn't resist taking the updated program for a spin.
Not just for textbooks anymore
Though Apple’s software still clearly slants toward the education market, this second version of iBooks Author acknowledges that people might want to create other styles and types of books. The template chooser offers three new landscape templates: Photo Book, which emphasizes big images alongside text; Antique, reminiscent of an old storybook; and Cookbook, self-explanatory and nice for authors planning to publish or collect recipes.
Like iBooks Author's textbook templates, the new landscape templates are organized by chapter and section, and have a mandatory glossary, but the section headers look less like they belong in a textbook. (The new version ditches the outline-style Section 1.1 and 1.1.1 section heads in favor of a simple Section 1.)
Portrait-only options (but no iPhone love)
In addition to the three new landscape templates, iBooks Author introduces portrait-only templates, which work especially well with Apple’s new iPad mini. Most of the new portrait-only templates skew away from the textbook design, instead targeting specific reading genres: Biography and Photo Book offer basic designs for those book types, while Gazette, Classic Text, and Charcoal take their cues from storybooks and picture books. Modern Basic is the lone new textbook-style template, and even it leans more toward minimalistic how-to than full-fledged instructional manual. Altogether, the program offers nine templates, and additional templates are available from non-Apple vendors.
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