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"Its well known that giving easy digital content creation tools into the hands of more teachers and students is a great way to encourage focus on higher order thinking skills in the curriculum. For schools with Macs and iPads, the release of Apple's iBooks Author software in January made this even more possible. Attached to this post is 1.0 draft of a 'know-why' guide to using iBooks Author to make digital content thats localised and personalised just for your students. Download and enjoy, plus leave comments if you have questions or feedback. To load, just download directly onto an iPad with iBooks 2 installed, and tap 'open in iBooks', or download to your PC and sync via iTunes."

"Awesome widgets for your iBook Timelines, mathematical formulae, interactive graphs & plots, crossword puzzles, quizzes, infographics, youtube videos... The possibilities are endless. No skills required Add stunning interactive content to your iBook, with zero skills. All you do is point, click and add text. Plugs right into iBooks Author Apple created a kick-ass tool, super easy to use. We'll make it even better! Royalty free Are you a school or teacher? We have a very affordable educational license! Selling your work on the iBooksstore? We charge a small fee per generated widget."

There are some disadvantages to using iBooks author for crafting your own learning materials. The biggest issue is that iBooks Author books can only be read on an iPad in the iBooks app. You can't even read the eBook on an iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, or PC. iBooks Author will export your work as a PDF, however, the PDF will lack the interactive table of contents, photo galleries, videos, and other hands-on elements. 

For iBook authoring. Add easy to update widgets that enhance iBook.

iBook Author Getting Started All enhanced books created with iBook Author need to start with a template. Apple has six suggested templates.  We have created our own stripped down template based on the golden ratio.  You can download it here.

"Follow these simple steps to learn how to create your own iBook and send it to the iBookstore! You can find searchable transcripts of these tutorials at http://ecjourno.com/diyjourno/"

"There are numerous sites that are now offering Tutorials and how-to guides for creating ebooks in iBook Author. As teachers are now comfortable with the idea of creating their own e-textbooks more and more people are looking for resources to learn how to build touch enabled books that take full advantage of the iPad capabilities. Inserting video and high resolution photographs is one thing but how about inserting 3D manipulatives and models that are touch sensitive.". This post offers is a list of some of the resources online.

As the post-PC era moves from interesting theory to cold, hard reality, one of the most pressing questions is: How can we use tablets, and especially the iPad, to help people learn? Most of the focus has been on ebooks replacing textbooks, a trend fueled by Apple's recent updates to iBooks. Specifically, the company released iBooks Author, a tool for creating immersive ebooks on the desktop. Plus, the new iPad is now the first tablet with a retina screen, making reading and watching multimedia on the device even more enjoyable. But technology is only as good as the system it's applied to. Much like a fresh coat of paint will not improve the fuel efficiency of a '69 Mustang, the application of technology to a broken system masks deeper problems with short-term gains.

I have recently published a book in the iTunes store. (Read about it here or here.) Some people have expressed interest in knowing how exactly I was able to do this. Well the good news is that it's not very difficult. The bad news is that you have to get the formatting perfect or it will be rejected.

This is going to be really helpful for us, as we are working on an iBook project for teacher PD ... thanks for sharing this

Creating an iBooks 2 book with 3D models, Dashcode widgets and interactive Keynote files. Create a Seller account, buy an ISBN, use iTunes Producer to manage your content and track sales using Connect. Download the sample "Kids Love Bugs" here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/dr.-kemps-kids-love-bugs/id497852225

Need to add a calculator into your book, or a insert a Vimeo or YouTube video? Add interactive elements to your books with Bookry's ever expanding catalogue of book widgets, that are already being used by educators and students around the world. Simply login to Bookry to create your widgets online, then download the widget files to your Mac and drag & drop it into your iBooks Author file - easy!

Interesting article for discussion on the Ed Tech Crew

Hi Tony, here is another that I thought was good as well http://hackeducation.com/2012/01/19/apple-and-the-textbook-counter-revolution/

And another http://www.richardolsen.me/b/2012/01/the-obligatory-textbook-post/