Chapter 6. Publish Your Book

Your pages have been meticulously constructed. Your design is gorgeous. Your table of contents is a navigational miracle. Your widgets are a revelation. Now comes the fun part: it’s time to publish your book! Or maybe it’s not so fun.... If you want to self-publish in the iBookstore, you’re going to have to jump through a few hoops first. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to keep the hoop jumping manageable. You’ll see what Apple’s requirements are and how you can go about meeting them.

Previewing Your Book on the iPad

Before you think about publishing, take a few minutes to preview your creation on the iPad to make sure that everything is showing up and working as you expect. Happily, Author has a simple tool that makes previewing your work on an actual device easy as pie. Just follow these steps:

  1. Make sure you’ve installed iBooks 2.0, available in the App Store, on your iPad.

  2. Use a USB cord to connect your iPad to your Mac.

  3. Open iBooks on your iPad.

  4. Back in Author, click the Preview icon, which is a small thumbnail of an iPad screen.

The file will immediately start downloading to iBooks on your iPad. Download status is represented by a small purple progress bar within the iBooks interface.

Note

You can limit the preview to a single chapter by highlighting that chapter in the Author sidebar and then selecting FilePreview Current Section Only.

Carefully preview each page, and be sure to take the time to view all sections in both portrait and landscape views. ...

Get Publishing with iBooks Author now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.