Ibooksauthor Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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 ...

Little delights: Pinching a page in iBooks Author

by Erica Sadun (May 10th, 2012)

Delighting and surprising are hallmarks of the Apple user experience. Imagine my response then when today, while working in iBooks Author, I discovered than in iBooks 2, I could pinch a landscape page and it would jump me to the table-of-contents view. Steve and I are converting our Pitch ...

You're the Pundit: Could Apple introduce iBooks Author print-on-demand?

by Erica Sadun (May 8th, 2012)

When it comes to evaluating the next big thing, we turn to our secret weapon: the TUAW braintrust. We put the question to you and let you have your go at it. Today's topic is print-on-demand. Everybody's doing it. Amazon does it. Lulu does it. Even Apple does it -- so long as what you're ...

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 ...

FoxTrot author creates "Pad Packs" with iBooks Author

by Kelly Hodgkins (Apr 17th, 2012)

FoxTrot creator Bill Amend packaged his beloved comic strip for the iPad using Apple's free iBooks Author publishing tool. Amend released these iPad mini-books recently and calls them the "FoxTrot Pad Pack". Each Pad Pack is US$1.99 and contains a mixture of 100 strips curated from the ...

Panotour Pro creates iBooks-embeddable digital tours

by Erica Sadun (Feb 29th, 2012)

On the heels of iBooks Author's introduction last month, we're starting to see tools emerge that support the creation of specialized embeddable widgets. The video that follows showcases Panotour Pro's virtual 3D tours, which can be exported to widget form and then included into your iBooks project. ...

iBookstore adds screenshots, promo codes, and more for publishers

by Chris Rawson (Feb 15th, 2012)

iTunes Connect has sent out a letter to content publishers detailing some changes and improvements to the iBookstore. Just like the App Store, the iBookstore now allows publishers to issue promo codes for content sold on the store -- up to 50 free codes distributable to book reviewers. Publishers ...

Diesel Sweeties turns iBooks Author experiment into successful Kickstarter

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Feb 10th, 2012)

A couple weeks ago, Richard Stevens decided to create a free ebook of with a month's worth of his webcomic series, Diesel Sweeties, using iBooks Author. We reported on the experiment then, but Stevens recently disclosed just how big of a success it was: More than 10,000 downloads in three days of ...

iBooks Author 1.01 out with updated EULA

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Feb 3rd, 2012)

An incremental release for iBooks Author has been released with changes to the program's EULA. The update is 143.50 MB, which seems pretty hefty for a EULA change. The change is an important one though, clarifying that Apple has rights over the format a book is in, not the content. If someone ...

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 ...

Daily Update for January 23, 2012

by Steven Sande (Jan 23rd, 2012)

It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires ...

Estimated 350,000 iBooks textbooks downloaded in three days

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jan 23rd, 2012)

Apple's textbook endeavor may be off to a better start than anyone expected. According to Global Equities Research, a firm that tracks iBook sales, iTunes customers downloaded over 350,000 textbooks in the first three days of availability. The system also logged 90,000 downloads of iBooks Author, ...