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• • January 20, 2012 at 10:24 am #61494
    Chuck Nigash

    Member

    If you haven't seen this, go here and get the free download.

    https://itunes.apple.com/us/app…..2466?mt=12

    We should have a lively talk about Apple's iBooks Author and InDesign. Within the first few minutes of opening it last night, I already saw a vintage Apple perspective. In the Terms and Agreements, Apple says the use of the software confines you to publishing exclusively through the App Store. This should raise some eyebrows.

    But in addition, I want to stir a healthy dialog. After reading so many details about InDesign ePUB, watching Anne Marie's videos & others, there are some fine lines to walk when using our beloved program. Anchored photos, just one of many things, for instance. Many.

    So I am personally am giving this a whirl and will write back. I thought maybe we could all jump in. Cheers!!

  • January 20, 2012 at 12:41 pm #61496
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Yeah … an Apple-only solution that only is readable on the iPad and exclusively can be sold on the iBookstore isn't turning any heads around me. The firm I work for is still going for regular ePubs: free to sell, free for the user to view on whatever they like.

  • January 20, 2012 at 4:43 pm #61498
    Chuck Nigash

    Member

    Very very early impressions: We didn't expect it to be, and make no mistake it is not ID.

    Good News

    Works just like Keynote and there is a lot to like.

    It is well-organized and mostly intuitive.

    Doesn't have problems publishing, doesn’t require deep knowledge of ePUB ins and outs, publishes free without DPS.

    Bad News

    Styling text is not great. After you've had InDesign you've had the best. Styles editing needs to improve—vastly. I mean, no baseline grid, shoot me now.

    Styling text is inconsistent and lacks hi-end features (nested styles, glyphs for custom bullets, many more). I created a style. I put my cursor in a different graf and tried to invoke the new style. There were overrides, it didn't work, and I couldn't figure where to clear those overrides. BLECH!

    Apple offers these great click & edit widgets, like slideshows, media, html, 3d … but when you drag them on your page it lets you know that if you want an html widget, it's not an html page you're loading from Finder — no, it's a Dashcode element created in some other Apple app. Same for 3d, it does not import the standard dxf or obj or 3ds file formats, it wants a Collada .dae file. (what the frack?!!)

    Draw a text box and try to import text — no, it doesn't work that way. You have to Insert Chapter! WHAT!?!? So it's back to the caveman days of cut & paste.

    Who is it ready for? It's prime-time for the person who wants to type into Apple's templates.

  • January 21, 2012 at 8:30 pm #61506
    Kip

    Member

    I think that it is exciting to see a way to make ebooks that is easier than the way it currently is in ID. Also it is great whenever I hear of a new competitor to Adobe as they really need a lot more competition, they have become too much of a monopoly.

    I am not sure what I think about keeping it iPad only. I can actually see a little bit of logic behind keeping it as a iPad only solution (other then the obvious reason of selling more Apple hardware.) Beyond just selling regular ebooks with text in them iBooks is now more interactive. What other tablets could this content currently be ported to? It is beyond the scope of black and white kindles, the Kindle Fire does a terrible job of magazine layouts so I can't imagine it working well with interactive textbooks. Just trying to navigate a single page requires a ton of pinching and zooming. Who wants to do that with their textbooks?

    The Nook is a better performing tablet but it also doesn't have a big enough screen to do the multimedia features in iBooks well. At the moment the tablets that are selling is the iPad at the high end and small screen or black and white tablets. There may be other successful large screen tablets in the future but to my knowledge the iPad is the only one that is really selling at the moment therefore it makes sense that their authoring software works exclussively with what is currently the best option available.

    I am really hoping that iBooks adds the ability to annotate and bookmark audiobooks. I like listening to audiobooks and have thought many times that it would be useful mark a certain part in the audio to review later.

  • January 25, 2012 at 10:14 pm #61554
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    I'm really interested in seeing how far Apple can take this 1.0 product. They're calling these “Multi-touch eBooks” and in their publisher guidelines they're encouraging use of it for far more than textbooks.

    AM

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