Creating an ebook with iBooks Author: .pdf and .ibooks
On 5 March 2013, the Handheld Learning Group met to hear from Jeremy Turner of the Centre for Labour Market Studies and Management. Jeremy has been involved in the production of materials for distance learners from these departments, and consequently he has seen a lot of paper being printed and shipped out ---- perhaps too much paper. It has recently been decided, therefore, to produce the learning materials in ebook formats -- both pdf and epub --- and next to totally discontinue the production and shipping of paper materials to distance students. The idea here is that students will probably already own some sort of mobile device, be it smartphone or tablet. Providing reading material in these two formats will ensure that students can read the ebooks on pretty much whatever mobile device they own. Hence, this is a BYOD or Bring Your Own Device solution for distance learners.
Jeremy uses inDesign to set up and create the ebooks. inDesign can be purchased for either Macs or PCs (I saw an educational price of about £120 but I am not sure it was the latest version of the software). Jeremy and his colleagues have been using inDesign for a long time since that was how they had been producing paper materials. inDesign is a professional tool, and it creates books in both pdf and epub formats. epub is the format used in all mobile ebook readers *except* the Kindle, which uses the mobi format. Jeremy stated that Kindle users know how to convert epub files into mobi -- this is part of the email service Amazon provides to Kindle owners.
Jeremy found that creating ebooks in these two formats was no more difficult than the format-for-print he had been doing already. One issue arising is that while pdf files preserve the pages and hence the page numbers, epub files do not preserve pages. An epub file resizes its pages to fit the size of the mobile device screen, whatever it is, and so page numbers become irrelevant, possibly causing confusion for referencing. This is the situation with ebook readers generally. One way I have seen this dealt with, has been to cite chapter, paragraph, and line, rather than page number. I imagine as ebooks make their way deeper into the academic experience, new conventions for citing ebooks will develop.
I have never used inDesign so cannot comment on its ease of use or otherwise. My impression is that because it is a professional tool, it is at least somewhat complicated. I have used iBooks Author, and it is easy to use. I've included a screenshot of an ebook file open in iBooks Author as I was creating the ebook. It's a small picture, but you might be able to make out the different templates along the top. I find this a bonus, enabling me to make the ebook look really nice even though I have no talent in graphic design. iBooks Author is Mac-only and it is free, and ebooks created with it can be saved in pdf and .ibooks which is the proprietary Apple iBooks format. But it does not save as epub, which is a bit of a problem. For a couple of ebooks I worked on, I created them first in iBooks Author, then I copied and pasted the text into Pages, which does save as epub. Pages, again Mac-only, costs about £20 and is easy to use.
The meeting was attended by many people from across campus who were interested to see how these departments have decided to handle distance learning materials. Jeremy promised to come back in a year and report how things are going. I for one would love to see student evaluation of their courses with learning materials provided in this way.
Since the meeting, I have been thinking about the trend, if there is a trend, to create learning materials in mobile-friendly formats. In a sense, pdf is the lowest-common-denominator mobile-friendly text format, but one needs to be aware of its limitations. With pdf, the page size is staunchly fixed. Is it a nice experience to read a pdf on a smartphone? Personally, I would say it is not a nice experience, but at least it can be done. In fact, one person attending our meeting said her department decided to create pdf documents in smaller page sizes, to fit mobile devices better. This is not a bad idea and I wondered who else might be experimenting with this. Epub should be a better reading experience on smartphones because the text is shaped to the screen. The Apple-only .ibooks is great for iPhones, but doesn't work on Androids. At the moment, my conclusion is that it is best to try and create both pdf and epub. Using inDesign sounds like a pretty tidy solution but I wonder how many academics would be happy to try using it themselves. iBooks Author is a more likely candidate for a busy academic to use, but it doesn't do epub.
Publishing for mobile is not really that new, but it does not seem to be settling down into tidy, easy solutions very quickly.
Terese Bird, Learning Technologist and SCORE Research Fellow, University of Leicester
Since the meeting, I have been thinking about the trend, if there is a trend, to create learning materials in mobile-friendly formats. In a sense, pdf is the lowest-common-denominator mobile-friendly text format, but one needs to be aware of its limitations. With pdf, the page size is staunchly fixed. Is it a nice experience to read a pdf on a smartphone? Personally, I would say it is not a nice experience, but at least it can be done. In fact, one person attending our meeting said her department decided to create pdf documents in smaller page sizes, to fit mobile devices better. This is not a bad idea and I wondered who else might be experimenting with this. Epub should be a better reading experience on smartphones because the text is shaped to the screen. The Apple-only .ibooks is great for iPhones, but doesn't work on Androids. At the moment, my conclusion is that it is best to try and create both pdf and epub. Using inDesign sounds like a pretty tidy solution but I wonder how many academics would be happy to try using it themselves. iBooks Author is a more likely candidate for a busy academic to use, but it doesn't do epub.
Publishing for mobile is not really that new, but it does not seem to be settling down into tidy, easy solutions very quickly.
Terese Bird, Learning Technologist and SCORE Research Fellow, University of Leicester
