iBooks Author App and the Page

Easy to customize pages with the iBooks Author app.

I came across the iBooks Author app in my Exhibition Project course this week. A guest speaker  spoke to the class about the use of technology in museums. She mentioned that a lot of museums, like the Guggenheim and the Ontario Science Centre, are starting to use the iBooks Author app to publish exhibition guides, educational and programming pamphlets, and museum reports.

Apple describes the app as a simple program that can be used by anyone to publish a beautiful multi-sensory iBook. Putting aside the negative ramifications surrounding Apple’s newest attempt to take over the publishing business, iBooks Author adds some really interesting elements to the form of the page.

  

Watch their promotional video here!

 

The app makes it ridiculously easy to create a book through the preformatted templates provided by Apple. Adding content is as easy as clicking and dragging finished content into the page area. From there you can easily change the format of headings and text if you want to, and any images added immediately rearrange the text to fit wherever they are placed on the page. 

Examples of the templates available within the app.

This app reinvents the page through the widgets included with iBooks Author. The video on Apple’s webpage describes the widget as dynamic multi touch sensory options that can be added to your page. Some of the elements which can be easily added include a gallery of images with individual captions (which are instantly formatted through the template options chosen at the beginning of the iBook), interactive objects and maps, full screen videos, keynote animations, 3D images, audio, and there is even an HTML widget which connects to the internet and allows the images and information within the iBook stay up to date. You can use more than one widget on a page, thus any page can have text, a photo gallery, an instructional video, an interactive animation, and more.

Example of a page with an audio widget.

Personally, I think the neatest page characteristic within iBooks Author app is that by switching your view from landscape view to portrait view you inadvertently switch the type of information displayed on the page. In landscape view the text and associated widgets exist contemporaneously. Yet when the reader switches the iPad into portrait view, the text becomes the main focus of the page while the widgets are shrunk and placed along the left hand border. Without the widgets the reading of the text is a lot simpler and straightforward, basically creating a completely different reading experience between portrait and landscape view. 

I have never read or created an iBook through this app, but the implications surrounding reading styles, learning, and publishing are worth exploring.