Carrying on its tradition of making things more obtuse for the rest of us, Apple did make me jump through a lot of hoops before I was able to figure out how to download iBook Author. Among other things was a popup box that appeared twice asking me for an App to download descriptive material and then at least once again to download the actual application.
Finally I had iBook Author up and running and was given six templates to select from. I chose the "Basic Template", but basic it was not. Boxes jumped around when I was just a wee bit off from where I thought I should click. The template has two pages per view; is that a comfortable way to view a book on an iPad? I don't know, I'm not ready to buy one. I still haven't figured out how to remove frames that I don't want and add frames that I do. The table of contents is not organized the way I would like.
I did manage to get a cover organized and the text of one of my Reader Weekly columns in as the first story. The first story is "Bear Stories", originally published in the Northland Reader in September 1999. The cover is below:
Advanced orders welcome!
One of the little glitches is that I couldn't figure out how to get my name in upper and lower case. I guess I'm not supposed to according to this template.
My next project with iBook Author is just how to organize the template to my liking. Maybe I'll have to create my own.
My proposed content will be animal encounters, adventures in the fire dept., adventures in various projects, and other musings about life in the woods and on the water from my Reader Weekly (fka Northland Reader) and my blog.
I wonder how many months this will take me and what the price point should be on it - 99 cents or $3.49.
On the other hand, it might be simpler to do this project in Google Books or whatever first. iBook is limited only to iPad users. Google Books and other formats might have a greater number of potential readers. I certainly hope more than the 30 or so people that read this blog regularly. Thank you very much to those 30 people.
