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Instant Apple iBooks How-to

Chapter 1. Instant Apple iBooks How-to

Welcome to Instant Apple iBooks How-to. This book will quickly teach you to work efficiently with iBooks on your iPad, organize and read books with iBooks, as well as teach you how to write your own book for iBooks using Apple's iBooks Author!

Using reading tools (Should know)

iBooks allows us to select text, underline it, make a note on the selected text, search a word in the dictionary or the Internet, or even search within the book. Some interactive books can also play audio/video or even audio navigation using the read-aloud feature, for general books. The VoiceOver utility on your iOS device can read out a book to the user.

Getting ready

For VoiceOver, on your iPhone, navigate to Settings | General | Accessibility and slide VoiceOver to On. Remember that VoiceOver will change the iOS device's behavior depending on the following actions:

Tapping once will select an item
Double-tapping will activate the selected item
Swiping three fingers will scroll the page

How to do it...

To copy, highlight, take a note, search, or share, double-tap the start of the text area and drag-select the required text; a pop up will appear on the page with the desired actions as seen in the following screenshot:
To highlight a text with different colors and underline it, just select the text with the highlighter and it will highlight the text (the default color is yellow).
Tapping the highlighted text shows a pop-up menu to change to different colors or underline the text, as well as the option to remove the formatting completely.
Besides, the sharing option (e-mail, Facebook, Message, Twitter) becomes available with both, the regular double-tap-to-select-text and single-drag-to-select-text methods.
Another great feature for reading is Fonts and Themes that allows a reader to increase/decrease font size and font family, as well as change the background between white, sepia, and black—allowing for great customization of the reading experience.
Here is the same page in night mode! Note that reading in night mode causes less strain to your eyes in the dark.

How it works...

iBooks has a great in-built functionality to make the reading experience as simple, elegant, and helpful as possible for a reader. No wonder sales of iBooks and iPads in the education sector are growing rapidly, so much so that some universities dole out iPads to students joining their courses.

There's more...

The in-built dictionary supports English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese.

Making and managing Collections (Should know)

If you are an avid reader of e-books and have hundreds of e-books and PDF files in your library, then you would know that managing, sorting, and organizing them in an efficient way is a tireless thing. With iBooks, you have an excellent way to organize and tag your books via Collections, something akin to creating folders and storing files therein.

We'll consider our previous example; we could download all books returned via the search for the keyword "London" and store them in a collection called "London" on our iOS device.

How to do it...

By default, iBooks has two collections: Books and PDFs, and as you buy books from the iBookstore, another collection gets added: Purchased Books.

Creating a collection:
1. To store all books related to "London" that we downloaded from the iBookstore, we create a collection called London by tapping the Collections button on the iBooks app.
2. Then we'll tap on New to create a new collection and will name it London, as shown in the following screenshot:
Adding books to Collections:
1. Once we have downloaded the books and they are visible on the iBooks' bookshelf, we can add the books to a collection by tapping the Edit button on the top-right corner of the screen.
2. Tap on the books we want to move to our collection and tap the Move option from the top-left corner of the screen and select London as shown in the following screenshot:
Moving, deleting, and re-arranging books in your collections:
1. Within our collection, we can move books to other collections as well as delete books by using the Edit button on the top-right corner within iBooks. You can re-arrange the books on the bookshelf by a simple drag-and-drop action.
2. By default, the bookshelf displays books in a grid view, but we can change the view by selecting the List View icon on iBooks, which displays the books in a neat list that can be sorted by title, author, and category.

There's more...

If you have multiple iOS devices, you can sync the same iBooks experience of Collections on all your iOS devices, by setting the Sync Collections options in your device's Settings to On.

Exploring iBooks Author templates (Should know)

iBooks Author comes loaded with some default templates to get you started with your book-writing adventure; from simple textbook templates to cookbooks and photo books. When you load iBooks Author, the first window that loads prompts you to select a default template from the available library.

Note

With Version 2.0 of iBooks Author, there is an option to select a Portrait Only mode that does not take the iPad orientation into consideration. This provides for better control of the layout.

How to do it...

Open iBooks Author and select the Basic template from the Landscape with Portrait page. This is a sample book with the following pages:
- Book Title page
- Table of Contents page
- Glossary page
- Intro Media page—think of this as a splash screen for your book
- A few pages of dummy content
We can customize this book by adding or replacing text, widgets, and other media, as can be seen in the following screenshot:
Similarly, to preview the book on your iPad, connect your iPad to your Mac and click on the Preview button to open your book on your iPad. Note that the iBooks app should be open on your iPad, otherwise you will see an error message such as the following:
To preview your book, make sure iBooks is open on your iPad

The other templates provide a similar interface to your book, just with a different look and feel and layout based on the template's theme. Besides the default templates available in iBooks Author, the Internet is full of templates for various types of books—some free templates, others need to be paid for.

A good set of free templates is Templates for iBooks Author Free available on the Mac App Store, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/templates-for-ibooks-author/id527161787?mt=12, while there is a great number of paid templates, the most notable being iBooks Author Templates available at http://www.ibooksauthortemplates.com/templates/all and Book Palette from http://www.jumsoft.com/book-palette/.

Building a London travel guide with iBooks Author (Become an expert)

So far, we have seen how to add books and PDFs to iBooks, also, we played a bit with iBooks Author. Now let us create a full working book with iBooks Author titled London CityGuide. This will incorporate all the widgets and functions available within iBooks Author as well as a case study for layout/design.

The content will be travel-specific for London, sourced from www.WikiTravel.org, Wikipedia, and other open sources. Images will be from Creative Commons wherever possible, or free to use, depending on licenses from original owners.

The finished book is available for download via the iTunes store at https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/london/id593298852?ls=1.

How to do it...

Building the front page:
1. Open iBooks Author and select the Editorial template. We will replace the placeholder image on the first page with an image of Tower Bridge from http://wikitravel.org/en/File:Tower_bridge_London_Twilight_-_November_2006.jpg.
2. Add the Tower Bridge image to your iPhoto library and then the image will be available for use within iBooks Author.
3. Within iBooks Author, now you can drag this image to the placeholder image on the first page to make your page look like the following:
4. Replace the dummy text on the introduction page with a generic description of London from WikiTravel. You may need to remove/edit some text to accommodate the spacing and layout; we have used the text "Noisy, vibrant and truly multicultural, London is a megalopolis of people, ideas and frenetic energy. The capital and largest city of both the United Kingdom and of England, it is also the largest city in Western Europe and the European Union. Situated on the River Thames, London remains an international capital of culture, music, education, fashion, politics, finance and trade."
5. Now for the book's cover page, let us use the Clock Tower photo from http://wikitravel.org/en/File:Clock_Tower.jpg. Now your book cover should look like the following; note that this is how the book will be displayed on the iBooks Bookshelf as well:
Building the History page:
1. The next page in our London CityGuide book will be a page that describes the history of the city of London. Click on page 2 of your book in iBooks; based on our template chosen earlier, page 2 of our book should look like the following screenshot:
2. We will now use information from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London) to build our History page. We copy the historical facts about London from Wikipedia, format it, and copy it to our page 2. As we keep adding content to our page, iBooks Author automatically adds new pages, depending upon the text.
3. Don't forget to rename the title of page 2 from Untitled to History; you can do so by right-clicking on page 2 and selecting the Rename option.
4. After adding our history information from Wikipedia, our History page should now look like the following:
Building the Transportation page:
1. We will create another section in our book to accommodate the transportation information for London; we do so by copying the Section 1 (History) page and renaming it to Transportation:
Previewing the books on your iPad:
1. Now would be a good time to have a quick look at the book and how it works on the iPad. The new iPad mini was used during the writing of this book. Now, we will move on to discussing how to preview books on your iPad (without submitting books to iBookstore).
2. From within iBooks Author, click on the Preview button on the toolbar in the header.
  Tip
  Make sure you have an iPad connected, as well as the iBooks app open.
3. Here is how our London CityGuide book looks on an actual iPad, starting with the index page:
4. Clicking on Introduction or swiping right-to-left (page-turn effect), shows us the Introduction page:
5. Similarly the History page (in landscape mode) looks stunning with the Thames river backdrop!
6. While the Transportation page looks like the following:
Building the Culture page:
1. In the previous section, we added a new section to our book, using the copy-and-paste method. iBooks Author also provides another way to add pages, sections, or even chapters to our book via the Add Pages button in the header toolbar. We use the same method to add a new section to our book and name it Culture.
2. We can also select the different layouts that we want for our section, as shown in the preceding image. We choose the Section Text layout for our Culture section. We then copy over the cultural information about London from Wikipedia onto our iBooks Author (after some formatting, by removing citations from the Wikipedia text). Note that on all the pages where we have used images to make our London CityGuide elegant, these images are sourced from Wikipedia and due attribution needs to be provided to the authors.
3. Our Culture page now looks like the following:
Having added a few background and general information about London, let's move forward to adding new chapters for attractions, restaurants, and shopping.
Adding chapters for attractions and restaurants:
1. We start by adding a new chapter using the Add Pages button from the header toolbar within iBooks Author and naming it as Attractions. The content for this chapter will be sourced from the WikiTravel page for London—http://wikitravel.org/en/London#See.
2. Similarly, we will add chapters for restaurants and add content from open source travel guide websites such as www.Wikitravel.org and www.Wikipedia.org. We will not go into the details of adding all the pages, since it is redundant, and by now you, the reader, should have a good idea of how things work with iBooks Author!
  Tip
  You can also choose to write you own content, maybe for your own hometown; get going around your town and get some pictures, and the rest is what we've already discussed.
3. Here is how the Attractions page should look like; for the benefit of the readers, we are including the full source code and text for this book; the name of the file is London_CityGuide.iba and it is available for download via the book's page on www.packtpub.com.
Note
Downloading the example code
You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

Adding HTML widgets and 3D models to your books (Become an expert)

There is more to an iBooks' book than text and images. With iBooks Author, you can add more interactivity to your books by adding HTML widgets and 3D models. Let's look at how iBooks Author helps us implement some of these exciting technologies in our books.

Getting ready

For our Attractions chapter we will add a few 3D models from Google Warehouse—http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/.

How to do it...

iBooks Author supports importing HTML5 widgets in the form of the .wdgt extension, which is basically a folder containing our HTML5 code, images, and an Info.plist file, which provides the iBooks app with information on how to run the HTML5 widget. We will create a simple Twitter widget that will pull information for the keyword "London" from Twitter.

Create a folder and name it twitter-widget-ibooks, and within the folder create an index.html file using your favorite text editor. Using a simple Twitter Mashup from http://www.designchemical.com/blog/index.php/jquery/jquery-tutorial-create-a-jquery-twitter-feed-plugin/, we modify the code to search for the keyword "London".
Here is how the HTML page should look now:
Rename the twitter-widget-ibooks folder to twitter-widget-ibooks.wdgt; the folder icon should now look like a widget icon.
Once the widget is ready, open iBooks Author and reload our London CityGuide book. Within the History section of the first chapter, insert an HTML widget using the Widgets button the toolbar, as shown in the following screenshot:
Drag the HTML widget under the At a Glance section, and keeping the HTML widget selected, under the Interaction tab in Inspector, select the twitter-widget-ibooks.wdgt widget we created before:
Previewing the book on your iPad shows the following results:
To see the real-time tweets for London, click the Twitter icon, and you should see an overlay with real-time tweets for London. Clicking on the X icon on the overlay will bring you back to the book's page.
Similarly, iBooks Author also supports importing 3D models as an interactive content within our books. Download a COLLADA (.dae file) model from http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=e47ab8e194c03e5d5e73daf3c0b064fa.
Extract the 3D model and import the same within our Attractions chapter, as shown in the following screenshot:
Preview the book on your iPad to see the 3D model in action!

How it works...

The HTML5 widget is a collection of HTML, JavaScript, images, and an Info.plist file that notifies the iBooks app to render an HTML code.

Apple has added support for 3D objects in a completed book with up to 50,000 moderately-textured polygons for the second-generation iPad and iPads with a Retina display; for the first-gen iPad, this number is 20,000. The format supported right now is COLLADA—an interchangeable file format for 3D applications supported by most companies and 3D modeling software.

There's more...

Apple has put a good overview on how HTML widgets can be compiled, and specifications for the can be found at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5068.

Key benefits

Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results.

Learn everything you need know, from reading iBooks to creating and publishing your own

Best practices and solutions for Apple iBooks

Presented in an easy-to-follow tutorial style, this book is your quick and compact guide to iBooks"

Description

"iBooks is a great tool for book lovers. This book is a guide for using iBooks for reading, managing, and creating books – everything that an avid reader (and the writer within you) would need. ""Instant Apple iBooks How-to"" is a practical guide that takes you on a reading and writing journey with iBooks for your iPad. Begin with getting familiar with iBooks and proceed to write your first interactive book with iBooks Author! This book begins with downloading the iBooks app from the iTunes store and adding books and PDF collections to it via iBookstore. The book then goes on to explain other technologies in the iBooks app and concludes by showing you how to write your own book with iBooks Author. Not only will you learn how to read and manage books effectively, but you will also learn how those books can be created with iBooks Author. You will also understand how iBooks Author templates can help you lay out a book easily; some third party templates are also available. You will learn everything to maximize your reading and writing experience for the iBooks platform."

What you will learn

Downloading iBooks and books for iBooks from the iBookstore

Adding and managing your PDF collections on iBooks

Enhancing your reader experience with reader tools and 3D support

Publishing with iBooks Author

Building a London Travel Guide with iBooks Author

Creating interactive books with HTML Widgets

What do you get with Print?

Instant access to your digital copy whilst your Print order is Shipped

Paperback book shipped to your preferred address

Redeem a companion digital copy on all Print orders

Access this title in our online reader with advanced features

DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

Frequently bought together

$21.99

$21.99

Total $ 43.98

onlyInSF May 15, 2013

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.My Verdict:I thought Instant Apple iBooks How-to was a really good quick-start book, and enjoyed using it. However, I wish it also included tutorials on other features iBooks Author supports; like exporting the ebook to PDFs, publishing the ebook for the iBookstore, and other widgets you can include in your ebook; like videos, audios, Keynote presentations, interactive images, image galleries, review questions, scrolling sidebars, and popover text boxes that appear when the user taps a graphic. I also thought it would have been nice if HTML5 code for the webpage in the Twitter widget had been included; in case there might be readers who are not familiar with HTML5 (I am). Instant Apple iBooks How-to is a well-written hands-on guide, but I feel it can use more detail.Article first published as [...] on Technorati.

Amazon Verified review

R May 29, 2013

"Instant Apple iBooks How-to" in some ways is two different books. The first part (pages 1-18) as described in the title, is a how to use iBooks with your iPad, and for anyone who is unfamiliar with the iPad and iBooks, this how-to is well-orngiazed, a with logical step-by-step process, and can get any user up and running quickly and easily. In addition, there are lots of graphics as examples to help the learning process, as well. If you are not familiar with Apple's iBooks, save yourself some time and read the book. However, for me the later part of the book was even more helpful, and that is "How to publish your own books with iBooks Author." While I have used iBooks on a regular basis with my iPad (and even my iPhone), this book showed me a few tips of which I was unaware. I had never tried creating my own book with iBook Author on my iMac, in fact never even thought about it. With this book I was able to do it, as easy as 1-2-3. Could I have figured it out on my own? Yes, but I would have wasted considerable time doing so, had a less-professional looking book, and I would have missed the tips and resources that this book gives. It's worth buying. Disclaimer: I am not an employee of Packt Publishing, nor am I being paid for my review.

Alexander ANICHKIN May 29, 2013

Apple iBooks How-to is a hand-holding guide to how to start using iBooks. The books is so easy to follow, provided you have an iPad or another iOS device at hand, that I can already recommend it to whoever has doubts or fears about venturing into self-publishing. Of course, it needn't be something grand, like War and Peace or Pride and Prejudice. You can publish you student paper or a family album too.

Instant Apple iBooks How-to: Learn how to read and write books for iBookstore, by fully utilizing Apple iBooks and iBooks Author

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