Writing an eText Book: progress update

In an earlier blog post on iBook Author (see eText Books: iBook Author - Apple changes the game?) I mentioned that I am attempting to write an eText book. Well this blog post is just a quick update on how things are going.

Now, having written a PhD thesis I know there is a danger in doing progress updates on how piece of work is going as they can have a negative impact on the process. In particular, you should never follow the dreaded word count!

When I was writing my thesis I foolishly installed a little program on my computer that tracked the number of words I was writing per day, the number of keystrokes, and even how far I had pushed the mouse. After using the program for about a week I removed it as I realised that some days I would significantly add to the word count, but on others the count would significantly decrease (and yet the keystroke count suggested I had been busy typing). This was quite demoralising, particularly if you had a final word count in mind for the thesis (which is a bad idea anyway). However, what this dramatic decrease in word count didn't show was that the act removing words was actually improving the quality of the final work by improving readability, and therefore improving understanding.

So, with that in mind here is a quick update on how things are progressing. So far I have written around 8,000 words (interestingly it was closer to 9,000 a couple of days ago, but then I spent a some time editing), and produced around 50 questions and about 20 figures.

What is working well with iBook Author?

I'm still finding iBook Author incredibly easy to use. The program doesn't get in the away of the writing process. The styles drawer is very easy to use which means you can get a consistent look and feel to what you are writing. Adding widgets for the figures, galleries and quizzes, is very very easy - it's just a case of point-and-click, drag and drop.

The export of eText book from iBook Author to the iPad is very easy, and is something that I strongly recommend any potential authors do on a regular basis just to check out how the book is looking and behaving on the iPad. (The way the book looks on the screen and on the iPad is very similar and at the same time surprisingly different. I think it has something to do with the different way you interact with an iPad compared to a computer, plus the widgets don't really work as well on the computer.)

What is not working well?

Two things took considerable time to get right.

The first was images in figures. For some reason I just couldn't get the size right, and even though the figure looked fine on the page, when it was enlarged (which is something you can do on the iPad but not in iBook Author) it looked absolutely terrible. The secret here was to respect the iPad screen portion sizes and adjust the canvas in the image drawing package to meet those sizes. Once I had done that drawing and adding figures became very easy.

The other problem I encountered was with the HTML widget.

The HTML widget allows you to include small interactive programs in the final book. To write these programs you have to use an Apple product called Dashcode (part of the Xcode install), which although very easy to use, can be a little bit flaky at times. The 'thing' you produce using Dashcode for use in an eText book is called a Dashboard widget (these are designed to run on the Dashboard on the Mac).

My first attempt to produce a Dashboard widget for use in an eText book didn't work. The Dashboard widget worked very very well in Dashcode and on the computer's Dashboard, but when it was imported into an eText book it completely refused to work.

I then discovered that even though Dashboard widgets are supposed to work 'as is' in the eText book, there are a few little quirks and problems that have to be overcome. For example, the final Dashboard widget must be produced in the '10.4.0 (backward-compatible)' format and not the default format, also there cannot be any sort of access to external files in the widget, and for some reason one of the neatest features of Dashcode, which is a very cool data source handling function, stops working once the Dashboard widgets has been imported into the eText book. (This may be due to the external file problem I mentioned above, or because the Dashboard widget has to be produced in the '10.4.0 (backward-compatible)' format.)

Having solved the above, and tested it all with a simple 'Hello World' Dashboard widget, I still couldn't get my widget to work. In the end I completely rewrote the Dashboard widget (with frequent testing in the eTextbook on the iPad) and it all worked! I have no idea why that should be the case....

Summary

In summary the process, so far, has been a lot smoother and a lot easier than I was anticipating (apart from the HTML widget problem). I have previously played with a number of different packages to produce eBooks, and I am finding iBook Author to be by far the most easiest to use.

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Writing an eText Book: progress update

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