Farhood Basiri

ere’s a quick summary of what you’ll want to know if you want to do some iBooks 2.0 publishing: - The iBooks creator itself is free, but you’ll need to install Mac OS X Lion to use it (so yes, no Windows support !). - You can download the iBooks Author here. - You don’t need a developer account and there is no up front cost to publish on iBooks. You can sign up to publish book content here. - Apple takes the same 30% cut as with apps. - You will need ISBN numbers for the books you want to distribute. I read some big blog saying these numbers cost $125, but I see ISBN.org selling them in packages for considerably less through here ($250 for 10) I’ve also seen them for as little as $5, but I cannot vouch for their legitimacy. However, there are apparently government agencies in some countries that can provide ISBN numbers free of charge. - This is not a replacement for a word processor, but you can import easily from both Pages and Word. You do get many text formatting options so once you’ve written your content you can format it in iBooks Author. - You can implant shapes, text, tables, and charts just like you can in the iWork line of apps. - You can program custom widgets using HTML/Javascript using Dashcode, and import them Dashcode files into iBooks creator so your programming skills still have a place . (time to dig up those old widgets!)
- There is a widget for touch controlled 3D models and the preferred format is OpenCollada. Read Apple’s best practices for 3D models here. - Apple provides some custom other widgets allowing you to easily embed a slick touch enabled image gallery, movies or audio, quiz style questions, Keynote presentations, and interactive images. - You’ll need an iPad to preview the books you’ve created. - iBooks creator can export beautiful PDF’s, but the PDFs are watermarked with an Apple iBooks stamp. - Published books are quite large and can be up to 2.0 GB so you probably should have bought the iPad with the bigger storage!

The set is a collection of widely used UI elements, including volume, zoom, player, view, and download controls.

According to new research from Flurry, around three-quarters of all new mobile app projects that use its technology were started on iOS over the second half of 2011.

Every week about 100 movies get released worldwide, along with about 250 books,” said Anindya Datta, the founder and chairman of Mobilewalla, which helps users navigate the mobile app market. “That compares to the release of around 15,000 apps per week.