Ibooklessons Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

iBook Lessons: The absolute beginner

by Erica Sadun (Jun 29th, 2012)

iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. I get asked this a lot: what is the absolute minimum it takes to get started in ebook publishing. The answer is this: a manuscript in Microsoft Word .doc or .docx format, an Amazon account, and a smile. Everything else ...

iBook Lessons: BookWidgets

by Erica Sadun (Jun 26th, 2012)

iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Developer Niels V. has been hard at work developing customizable HTML5 widgets for iBooks Author integration. He and his partner started working on this project when iBooks Author first debuted this past January. Since ...

iBook Lessons: Folium Book Studio

by Erica Sadun (Jun 22nd, 2012)

iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. I was recently contacted by the developers behind Folium Book Studio. Folium offers a web-app based alternative to iBooks Author, allowing you to build EPUB and Mobi titles. They also can export HTML to support ...

iBook Lessons: Can an iBooks-only strategy work?

by Erica Sadun (Jun 17th, 2012)

iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. One question I keep encountering is this: "If iBooks Author is so great, can I make enough money selling only through Apple and only to iPad owners to stay in business?" The answer to that is that results will vary. Can ...

iBook Lessons: Publishing costs

by Erica Sadun (Jun 13th, 2012)

iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Andrew Hyde jumped into the ebook business with both feet. After fully funding a KickStarter project to raise start-up costs for his "This Book is about Travel," he published his manuscript to a variety of vendors. His ...

iBook Lessons: Style sheets

by Erica Sadun (Jun 8th, 2012)

One of the challenges Steve Sande and I face, when building our ebooks, is to present our manuscripts with reasonable typographic flair. That's harder than you might first think because readers can customize many ebook features, including fonts. In iBooks, they may choose sans-serif Seravek ...

Cleaning Mona Lisa: Bringing iBooks to a new standard

by Erica Sadun (May 29th, 2012)

TUAW was treated to an advanced look at a new iBook from Tapity. "Cleaning Mona Lisa" offers all of thirty-odd pages of content. Of those, perhaps half are a gallery of pictures. Those numbers are deceiving however, as the application's video content, gorgeous imagery, and interactive widgets ...

iBook Lessons: Book samples and rookie mistakes

by Erica Sadun (May 23rd, 2012)

iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Talk about rookie mistakes! We finally discovered the reason the iPad-only iBooks Author version of our Mountain Lion ebook got stuck on its way to release: we hadn't submitted a custom sample along with the full ...

iBook Lessons: The long and short of ebook submission review times

by Erica Sadun (May 21st, 2012)

iBook Lessons is a continuing series about ebook writing and publishing. Last Autumn, after Apple launched the iPhone 4S, Steve Sande and I wrote Talking to Siri. It took several weeks to move through Apple review. Throughout all that time, people kept asking us, "Aren't you going to offer an ...

iBook Lessons: Using Book Proofer to preview EPUB files

by Erica Sadun (May 16th, 2012)

iBooks Author is an amazing tool for laying out and publishing ebooks to iTunes. Unfortunately, the application creates books that are only readable on iPads. You trade off fantastic page design (via Apple's proprietary .iBooks format) for a much smaller potential reading audience. When you ...

You're Our Editor: iBooks Author or ePub for the iBooks store?

by Erica Sadun (May 6th, 2012)

Normally we turn to the TUAW Brain Trust for your opinions about hot topics in the news and your predictions about the future of tech. Today, we're switching things up. Instead of asking about where things are going, we're asking you about strategy. Here's the situation: Like many authors, TUAW ...

iBook Lessons: Creating Amazon KDP tables of contents on MS Word for Macintosh

by Erica Sadun (May 5th, 2012)

For whatever reason, many Amazon authors seem to be under the impression that you can only create a proper table of contents for Kindle Direct Publishing on Windows, not the Mac. Having just uploaded our newest book (Getting Ready for Mountain Lion) to Amazon, Steve Sande and I have invested a ...

iBooks Author Challenge: Adding spelling quizzes to iBooks

by Erica Sadun (Feb 3rd, 2012)

Dave Caolo and I were chatting this morning about iBooks and spelling. "It's not my daughter's favorite subject," he said, "and I'm looking for a way to make it more appealing to her." He asked if there could there be any way to incorporate spelling quizzes into iBooks via Author. The answer ...

Using iBooks Author to produce a comic

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Jan 25th, 2012)

When iBooks Author was released last week, I saw the potential for using it to port the webcomic I co-create to the iPad to go along with our upcoming print edition. I'm not alone, as Richard Stevens of Diesel Sweeties immediately took the chance to test iBooks Author by creating an ebook with ...

iBooks Author owns your format, not your content

by Erica Sadun (Jan 24th, 2012)

There's been a lot of heat and fury surrounding the iBooks Author terms and conditions ever since the service was introduced last week. To boil the controversy down to basics, Apple has introduced a private protocol extension that takes EPUB to the next generation. And then they created a ...