Notes on iBooks Author
I downloaded iBooks Author minutes after Apple announced the product last week. I had 
hoped to have my first book published and up on the iBookstore by now, but .... well you know how life sometimes gets in the way...
In any case, I just wanted to share some quick observations, a tip or two and point out a Gotcha that got me...
Hopefully this will be useful to others starting out on this journey.
First I wanted to say Thank You to the folks at Apple for releasing this product. As they always do, somehow they’ve managed to take a pretty boring subject like book publishing and make it exciting, sexy and looking like the Second Coming...
First the Gotcha!
iBooks 2 for iPad cannot handle intro movies in an iBook. That means you should NOT add an intro movie to your iBook. With the currently released iBooks app, it will crash. Horribly.
You will need to delete the app from your iPad, reboot the device, and download it again from the the AppStore. Then delete the offending title.
NOTE: the Biology Text book by E.O. Wilson that Apple themselves were promoting also contains an intro video, so do NOT open that in iBooks 2.
UPDATE (Sunday Feb 5, 2012) Apple has release iBooks 2.01 which seems to better handle the intro videos. iBooks is no longer crashing when I have installed and viewed the Life on Earth textbook. That's a good thing!
Tip #1
Do as much text editing as you can in Pages or Word beforehand. They’re simply just better, purpose-built tools for text entry and manipulation. iBook Author is for page layout.
If your final book is intended to have chapters, build your book by creating one Pages (or Word) document per chapter, or section. If you wont need any chapters, you’re safe to create the entire book in a single document.
Tip #2
That table of contents is automatically built using the chapter names that exist at the first save after they are imported. Should you need to change them, right click on the chapter name visible in Book Outline or Page Thumbnails list in the left-hand pane. It’s supposed to pickup the name from the Chapter Title... but that doesn’t seem to always work.
All in all, pretty good stuff for a 1.0 product.
Ok. That’s it for now. When I see more, I post again...
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