Do you love to read ebooks on the iPad? Are you a writer who wants to
publish his or her own interactive ebooks for the iPad, and sell them
on the iBookstore? Zeeshan Chawdhary, a highly experienced web and
mobile developer who is currently the CTO of iCityConcierge Ltd, a
travel startup, shows you how to do both in his new book
Instant Apple iBooks How-to.
To read ebooks, you use the app iBooks in your iPad. To write and
publish ebooks, you use the app iBooks Author in your Apple MacBook or
iMac. The first five sections describe how to use iBooks, and the rest
tell you how to use iBooks Author 2.0, the latest version of the program
as of this writing. You should also know how to create an HTML5
webpage.
For readers: how to use iBooks
In these sections, you are
introduced to features that enable you to browse and purchase ebooks (or
download free ebooks), group these ebooks into different categories; or
Collections, and add PDFs to the iBooks library. You also learn about
tools that you can use while you read these books. These reading tools
enable you to select text from the book to be copied, pasted, and
emailed. In iBooks 3.0.2, which was current when he wrote this book, you
can also change the color of the highlight when the text is selected,
and use the Fonts and Themes feature to change the font size and family
of the text, and the color of the book's background.
If you're using iBooks 3.1, please note that this version no longer
has these last two features. The horizontal bar that appears when you
select the text has also changed. When you tap the text to select it,
only the words "Copy" and "Search" appear in the bar. If you tap one
word, the word "Define" - which enables a box with a dictionary
definition of this word to appear - will also show up in the bar. To
view iBooks - and the rest of your iPad - in "night mode," go to your
Settings app, press Accessibility, then switch Invert Colors to On.
For writers: how to use iBooks Author
Here,
Instant Apple iBooks How-to
teaches you how to create an interactive London travel guidebook by
choosing a template (you can find templates in the program itself, or
various websites), and editing the text and graphics. In iBooks Author
2.0, you can now directly drag images from websites onto placeholder
images. Then you learn how to create a custom HTML5 Twitter widget that
pulls tweets about London into the ebook, and a widget where a 3D object
can be viewed and rotated in the ebook. When inserting a 3D object into
your iBooks Author 2.0 document, make sure "Auto-rotate object when
idle" is unchecked; otherwise the 3D object will not show.