Be Careful What You Wish For...

For some time now I've been hoping that Apple would do some kind of interactive book publishing tool for the iPad. And today my wish was granted; they announced iBooks Author.

It looks pretty good too: a sort of Pages/iWeb type application that publishes to the iBook store. Apple has done a couple of nice things too; you can test it on your own iPad locally, and they will let us common folk publish to the iTunes store (previously, if you weren't a big publisher, you had to go through some publishing service.)


That's the good news; the bad news? Well apart from the fact that it only supports the iPad (no iPhone) and if you already have an iTunes publisher account, you'll have to create another account to publish books, there is one little fly in the ointment....it will only run under Lion, and I'm still running Snow Leopard! (I have a policy on only upgrading OS's when I get a new machine, or when a software application requires it!)

So great...now I have to spend the weekend installing Lion and getting used to that. I hope Lion doesn't break anything else...

MacWorld: Hands on: iBooks Author effortless to use, but iPad-only




Comments

Martin Koch said…
I hope your update to Lion behaves well. I can't update to Lion because I still use Adobe CS3 so I was very glad to find this today: http://www.giga.de/downloads/ibooks-author/tipps/apple-ibooks-author-fur-os-x-snow-leopard-nutzen
I was able to download and run iBook Author on Snow Leopard within 10 minutes by temporalily changing my OS version number to 10.7.2 as shown in this article. Hope this helps others who can't upgrade to Lion right now.
Jan 21, 2012, 11:37:00 AM
Michael Murie said…
That's cool...I think. Unfortunately as I can't read the article I'm a little hesitant to try it!

I'd be interested to hear how things go for you!
Jan 21, 2012, 2:54:00 PM
Martin Koch said…
Here's a shortform description in English:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/19/2719087/how-to-run-ibooks-author-app-in-snow-leopard

It works fine. The only thing not supported are 3D Widgets because they require Lion but I can live with that.

Lion also gives you more fonts I've read.

I think iBook Author is great and really simple to use. Drag and drop, copy and paste, connect your iPad, open iBooks click Preview and enjoy.
Jan 22, 2012, 5:07:00 AM
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