Publishing with iBooks Author

Chapter 2. Book Building Basics

In the chapters that follow, you’ll learn how to build the components and pages of your book. You’ll see how to employ the tools and widgets introduced in Chapter 1 to create new sections and chapters, style text, lay out pages, and insert and manipulate images. Then, you’ll move on to the fun interactive stuff you can do with iBooks Author built-in widgets.

Before you get into the nitty-gritty of creating ebooks, however, you need to reconsider your notion of the “page.” In this chapter, you’ll see how, with the iBooks Author publishing platform, Apple has re-envisioned traditional page layouts and book design to come up with something new altogether, which they are calling Multi-Touch Books.

What Is a Page?

Trying to learn about differences between ebook formats can be a dizzying experience. Each device accepts some certain subset of the available formats. The Kindle accepts Mobi and PDF, but not EPUB. iBooks accepts EPUB and PDF, but not Mobi. You can probably think of more examples. So what are the differences among these types, and why should anyone care?

Page Layout, Fixed

Most fundamentally, there are two kinds of ebook formats—those that use a fixed page layout and those that use a fluid page layout. PDF is the classic example of a fixed page layout. No matter which device you read a PDF on, the text, images, and all of the other parts of the page will always look the same. The fonts will never change, and the page numbers are eternal. Traditional ...