Five improvements iBooks Author needs to make
I build books for a living. My primary job here at Macworld is editing how-to ebooks written by editors on staff, our frequent contributors, and even myself. It’s also, on occasion, one of the most infuriating tasks I’ve ever taken on. Not the editing or the writing—no, my troubles come from the process of making the books.
Apple’s iBooks Author software tries to deal with some of my issues with ebook-making, removing the need to know HTML/CSS and letting you build books that look the same on your iPad as they do in the app.
But though I was excited by iBooks Author’s release, I struggle to use it in our ebooks business. You’d think it would be a no-brainer: Mac software that creates beautiful books for the iPad. What’s not to love? Unfortunately, the answer is “a lot”—now that the honeymoon’s over, I know iBooks Author’s flaws all too well. And, unfortunately, these flaws aren’t ones you can just brush under the carpet.
Ebooks? Hold the iPhone!
I’ve griped often about the pain of building ebooks for multiple platforms, and I’m not expecting iBooks Author to suddenly allow me to build a beautiful multitouch book for the Kindle. It’s Apple’s program, and it makes sense that the resulting books would work only on Apple’s devices. Yet, Apple limits you even beyond that: You can read an an ebook created in iBooks Author only on the iPad—not on the iPhone or the iPod touch.
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