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iBooks Author released: Drag and drop to create iBooks for iPad

If you’ve not got round to writing that book, then perhaps Apple’s iBooks Author is the motivation you need. iBooks Author, announced today, is a new Mac program that allows you to create interactive iBooks to be read on the iPad.

Rather than just allow you to lay out your 700-page yarn in a manner similar to Scrivener does, iBooks Author allows you to drag an drop pictures, photo galleries, video and animated objects.

Templates for layouts are included which you can follow to the letter or customise yourself. There’s templates for children’s books and picture books as well as more traditional text-heavy books.

You can hammer out chapters in Word or Pages and import text directly to iBooks Author. Adding pictures and video content is a simple case of dragging and dropping from the toolbar at the top of the screen into a blank page field.

Similar to how you can self-publish your work on Amazon’s Kindle Store, once your iBook is finished, you can submit it for publication in the iBookstore, either for sale or for a free download. If you’re writing something for inclusion in iTunes U, Apple’s new educational portal, you can share an iBook through here as well.

iBooks Author is free to download from iTunes now, but you’ll need a Mac running OS X 10.7.2 Lion in order to use it.
 

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