From the course: Ebook Foundations

What makes the iBooks format special?

From the course: Ebook Foundations

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What makes the iBooks format special?

- [Instructor] I honestly wish that every eBook was as capable and as beautiful as the iBook format. You create an iBook/eBook, I know it's kind of silly, but the name of the extension is .iBook, so I'll refer to them as iBooks throughout this chapter, from iBooks Author. A program that is free from Apple. And if you go to the iBook store and you look around at some of the more complicated and beautifully designed eBooks that they have there, look for the words multi-touch, because that is usually a clue that it was created in iBooks Author. And by multi-touch they mean that if you're looking at it on an iPad or iPhone then there are lots of things that you can touch that will start interesting interactivity in the eBook. I have an iBook open right now on my iPad, and let me show you just a few of my favorite features of the iBook format. First, when you're at a chapter opener and the program iBooks Author automatically creates these chapter openers for you, you just fill in the text and swap in the picture, you see the thumbnail navigation at the bottom. Right now I'm dragging across so I can drag across and tap on any of these to jump to that page. Or I can tap on any of the entries under the Introduction to Ecology heading at the top. This thumbnail navigation is kind of familiar, because you saw how fixed-layout eBooks have thumbnail navigation at the bottom. But unlike those eBooks, as soon as I actually tap on a page, like I'll tap on this one with the map, then the thumbnail navigation is gone and I can see the entire book. I'm just going to swipe through just to look at some of the pages. Do you see how beautiful it is with the type and images all together integrated? It's very easy to do this in iBooks Author. In this image is actually a slideshow, you see the three dots at the bottom? So I can swipe across the image itself to swipe through the slideshow. And these are so simple to create in iBooks Author. Another interesting feature of the iBook format is that by default users can tap the little A and big A at the top, and when it's in landscape view it's actually like a fixed-layout eBook, so I can't change the size of the type. Which means that designers have full control over how the book looks page by page, line break by line break. But I can turn on scrolling view, and this is something that's turned on by default in iBooks Author for every publication that you create, but you as a designer could disable it if you don't want your users to be able to do this. You'll see what happens when I turn on scrolling view by tapping it. Now we have a reflowable eBook. Isn't that cool? Now all of the interactive objects and the images are in the left-hand bar, kind of like margin notes, and I can change the size of the type by tapping the big A and the little A. I can't change the font though, like you can with reflowable eBooks. But having this reflowable view, what they call scrolling view, in the same book as the fixed layout is really neat. Now if there was a gallery, here we go the Gallery of the Forest, I can tap right on the thumbnail picture and it comes up full screen, with the caption. And then I can swipe across, to see the other pictures in the gallery. There is a X at the upper left that I can tap to close this and return to the book. And if I want to go back to fixed-layout view, I'll just tap here in the controls, tap the little A big A, and turn scrolling view off, and it reverts back to fixed layout. As you'll see in other videos in this chapter, you can include all sorts of cool interactivity inside the iBook format. Not just galleries but also video, audio, quizzes, all sorts of fun stuff. We'll take a look at a few of them. And there are Using iBook's Author courses here in the online training library if you want to get more in to it.

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