Writing an eText Book: progress update II

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 a second update on how things are going (see Writing an eText Book: progress update for my last update two weeks ago).

In my last update I was at 8,000 words, and had produced around 50 questions, and about 20 figures. I am now at 17,400 words, around 70 questions and 30 images, so things are moving along. Yes, I am aware of the dangers of the 'word count game' (see my last update, but I have to have some way of measuring progress - or lack of).

Change of plan

Using iBooks Author has changed the way I write - this has surprised me. To me writing was always a fairly linear process, i.e. I started at one end of the book/paper/report/chapter and wrote through to the other end. Yes, I would go back and edit and polish, but overall I started at the start and worked through to the end. At least that was the way my Ph.D. thesis went, and I have also written scientific papers and grant applications following that approach. However, with iBooks Author I find I'm hopping around much more, I'm more likely to return to the section at a later date and add in other material, or completely remove material.

I've also found that using iBook Author, and then playing with the generated iBooks on an iPad, has changed the way I am viewing the actual final eBook. For example, I've already thrown away some large sections of text that I now think are irrelevant, and replaced them with simple interactive widgets, which I think tell the story much better and, more importantly, get the information across in a far better way.

Two final things that have changed: 1. I have now decided to write the book, and then edit (I was editing as I went along); and 2. I have discovered that I really need to build and test the book on the iPad at regular intervals just to check everything is working, and to check that the book looks and feels right.

What is working well with iBook Author?

iBook Author is still working very well, and really is very easy to use. There are a few 'rough edges' here and there (see below), but overall the program is a joy to use.

Writing simple interactive widgets is working very well, and the process of writing them and dropping the finished product into the book is very easy, and I am now finding that the widgets work when the book is transferred to the iPad pretty much every time. The experience I reported in the last post where the widget worked great in Dashcode, and on the Mac, but wouldn't work on the iPad has not been repeated. Looking back the problem may have been I went too complex too early with my first widget.

What is not working well?

I have had a few problems.

Bookmarking - Adding and linking to bookmarks is very easy, what is not working for me is managing bookmarks. I have found that I have very rapidly built up a long list of bookmarks that don't have any meaning. When you create a bookmark you highlight the word, and make it in to a bookmark. This automatically adds the bookmark to the list of bookmarks, and the bookmark name is the word you highlighted. The problem is that after a very short time it is difficult to know what a single word bookmark means - what does it really bookmark? I have found I have had to rename a number of the bookmarks in the list with something more meaningful.

Also, when you create a bookmark link in the text there is no mechanism that allows you to check that the bookmark points to the right place, other than clicking on the link and going to the bookmark. This can be confusing and you can soon (and often do) lose you place in the book. A simple popover view to see where the bookmark link goes, or even a back button, would fix this problem.

Glossary - The glossary is a really neat feature, basically you highlight a word to include in the glossary and then click 'Add to glossary'. Likewise if the word or phrase is already in the glossary and you want to create a link you just highlight the word and it suggests the appropriate glossary link. Where this doesn't really work very well, and this surprised me, is that you have to manually link any additional occurrences of the word or phrase to the glossary. I was very surprised that this wasn't done automatically.

Some solutions

Glossary - Simple solution - use the find command to locate all occurrences of the particular word, and then manually go through and turn them into glossary links. A bit tedious but it works.

Also, after my last post I had a couple of emails thanking me for my posts on iBook Author, and one handy hint from Paul Pillot for dealing with protein structures in iBook Author:

"Just to let you know, I've tried the ePMV plugin for Blender produced by the scripps institute. I am far from mastering blender yet, but I could easily produce a dae file. Unfortunately as I don't have Lion installed, the dae file didn't load in the eBook (a Snow leopard specific error exception was thrown) but i'm quite sure it works as the dae file is well displayed in the quick look. Colors are kept."

Also I've found that I iBook Author can only handle about 20,000 triangles in the final protein image, so that can also be limitation.

Summary

I am making progress....

More updates to follow.

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