Before You Begin

Before you create your first textbook with iBooks Author, download and browse E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth—a free biology textbook that Apple uses to showcase interactive features and proper book design. On your iPad, open iBooks; tap Store to open the iBookstore; and then search for the book by title or author name, or navigate to it in the Textbooks category (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3. Download Life on Earth for free from the iBookstore.

Tap the Free button to download the book to your bookshelf. Textbooks look no different on the shelf from standard EPUB books. Tap the book’s cover to open it. Life on Earth starts with a video introduction by the author. The clip ends to show Chapter 1. Textbooks contain conventional elements like headers, main text, and pulled quotes, as well as interactive elements like movies and 3D objects (Figure 1.4).