iBooks Author: Developing Interactive Textbooks

Apple has not only introduced a new e-textbook platform but also created a new tool to make creating interactive textbooks a whole lot easier. iBooks Author can be used to create textbooks, cookbooks, and other types of interactive material on Mac computers. You can not only add text and images, you get multi-touch widgets for photos, movies, presentations, and 3D objects.

iBooks Author has a bunch of templates to save you time putting your e-books together. Playing with text and book layout is straight forward. Users can take advantage of the widgets available to add presentations, interactive images, 3D objects, and custom HTML to their works. Books can be previewed before submission to the iBookstore.

iBooks Author is not perfect by any means. The app does have some bugs at the time of this writing. Better support for mathematical content would be nice too.  Apple is just getting started though.