woodwing

Although not a complete surprise, Apple launched an impressive application at their New York event on January 21st: iBooks Author.

Together with iBooks 2, the update of iTunes U, the immediately availability of free (US) textbooks and the fact that iBooks and iBooks Author are free of charge, clearly shows Apple's ambitions regarding the educational market.

It was not a complete surprise since it was specifically mentioned in Jobs' biography: "In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was a $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction."

You can imagine that we at WoodWing were specifically interested in iBooks Author as the creation tool.

After a short review we came to the conclusion Apple did (again) a great job. The Apple-like UI feels comforting, the templates are useful, the interactive features are a good start, the 'interactive image' is very creative and the fact it is meant for textbooks enables Apple to create the navigation as part of the app. Within half an hour our first interactive book was ready.

Apple clearly had a good look at others. How clever is it to do a 'non-floating, designed view' in landscape and allow for font resizing in portrait mode ;-)

For the creation of interactive text-books this is definitely (the start of) a great authoring tool. It is to be seen though how the app is received in environments where people have to work together, where the assets are kept in a database, where workflow is required. Is McGraw-Hill really putting iBooks Author on every editor's (Mac)-workstation?

It will be interesting to see how the app develops. The need for textbook publishers (and other publishers) having to re-purpose their content for other channels like print will become a requirement. The need for publishers having to fit the creation of interactive publications in their existing process is a must to limit production cost. The freedom designers require to create a diverse product is not (yet) catered for. And the current limitation for iPad only and not being able (without Apple's permission) to publish to other stores will limit the potential of this application in its current form among publishers.

It's likely though that creating a new authoring tool for interactive publications was not Apple's goal on itself. It seems fair to assume that iBooks Author isn't about getting into the market of professional authoring tools, it is about transforming the educational market.