Providing iBooks Author Feedback to Apple

One of the most useful widgets for iBooks Author is the Keynote widget. It enables you to add a presentation to an interactive iBook using the features of the Keynote.app for MacOS X and iOS, including many of the transitions and builds. You can even convert a PowerPoint presentation to Keynote and bring that content into your iBook as well. The full details are in this technical note.
The one disappointment I had was that this widget does not support voiceover narration. This can seriously diminish the value of a slide presentation. The reader can flip through the slides forward and backward but they have to guess what the presenter might have said. Peter Norvig did a wonderful six slide Powerpoint presentation illustrating this very point. See the slides for President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address here. View the slides on-line or download the presentation as a *.ppt file.

As you'll see, there is something missing, something very important.

Of course there is a way around this. In Keynote, you can add a voiceover and export the presentation as a video to include in your iBooks Author project using the media widget. You can also use screen casting software such as ScreenFlow to capture slides, narration and even a secondary video source such as a PIP (picture-in-picture) of the speaker. The problem with these audio-annotated slideshows done as video is that their file sizes are unnecessarily large. This is a problem for iBooks both because of the 2 GB limit and the time it takes for readers to download very large iBooks. This might well reduce ones audience.
My use of the word "unnecessarily" should signal that there might be an even better workaround and there is – sort of. What I'm about to describe would be a great workaround if it were supported by iBooks Author. It is not currently supported in iBooks Author but users of that application can change that. Request an enhancement right from within iBooks Author like this:

The workaround that's better than a video is called an "enhanced audio" file. It is created in GarageBand and carries the *.m4a file name suffix.. You may also see it referred to as an "enhanced podcast" file. What makes the enhanced audio file such a great alternative to video is that it uses one static image of a slide over its entire time on screen instead of 30 frames per second as in a video. If a 50k slide is on-screen for 100 seconds in an enhanced audio file, that image contributes only 50k to the total file size. If a 50k slide is on screen for 100 seconds in a video file, that image contributes 150,000k ([50*30]*100) to the total file size. That's 50k vs 150 Mb, a 3000:1 ratio in this example! In real life, the difference is somewhat less than this because good video encoding uses a number of neuroscience-based tricks to present incomplete data in between the key frames that are full representations of what the camera captured. That fools the eye and takes less space. Still, the difference is quite significant. We'll look at a real world comparison below.

Since this is not a how-to post, I'll leave that task to others. There are many fine tutorials teaching you how to use GarageBand to create enhanced audio files on the web. Here's a good one in the form of a PDF.

I created an example using some ancient media describing the beginnings of the Space Shuttle program. Intended for school use, the package contained a cassette audio tape and a set of photo slides. The audio tape has sharp "beeps" to tell the projector operator when to advance to the next slide image. I've left those beeps in for their nostalgia value. Here's the enhanced audio file slide show:

You may download a copy of this file here and it will play (larger) in QuickTime X Player, in the iTunes.app and may other venues that support QuickTime but just not iBooks Author and the iBooks it creates. This 18 minute presentation is only 21.4 MB in size! Space-efficiency isn't the only advantage of enhanced audio files. The assembly of the static images creates a chapter track that enables the viewer to quickly and easily move to any part of the presentation. This is great for studying a topic where revisiting a difficult section is helpful. Here's a screenshot to illustrate what a chapter track looks like:

Here's a view of the GarageBand project that created this enhanced audio file:

So, what would this presentation cost us in terms of file size if it were a video? I created an *.mp4 version with ScreenFlow using the same assets. That version weighed in at 198.2 MB. You may download a copy of that file here. The *.m4a file tipped the scales at 21.4 MB. The video version is approximately 9.3 times larger than the enhanced audio file yet playing them side by side reveals no important differences. Here's a screencast of that analysis:

If you'd like to download and view a larger version of this video, you may do that here.

The one on the left is the c. 200 Mb video and the one on the right is the c. 20 Mb enhanced audio file. So, if you are at all impressed by the potential advantages of being able to use an enhanced audio file in an iBooks Author project, send in that enhancement request to Apple as described above and do that ASAP.

By the way, you can add an enhanced audio file to an iBooks Author project and it will play the audio part. No slides though and that's where the biggest advantage is. Here's what that looks like in iBooks Author.

Note that there is an option for "Show Audio As:" that includes an "Image" option. That doesn't make the slides appear though. That's for drag/dropping a single image onto it that will appear throughout the duration of the audio. Yes, I got real excited when I first saw that.

Here's something that I picked up at Academix 2010.  It's a way for for folks who have no coding chops whatsoever to quickly and easily build iPad-optimized web apps from text, images and video that they collect.  The presentation I got this from was delivered by Sal Soghoian who is the AppleScript Product Manager at Apple, Inc. Fortunately for us, he's developed a companion web sited called Padilicious where you can read all about it and download all of the materials you'll need to learn how to generate iPad-optimized web applications in minutes.

This method takes advantage of several MacOS X technologies (AppleScript, Automator and Services) so you'll need a modern Mac running MacOS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard) or later. What you'll be downloading from Padilicious and using is an automated workflow that requires zero HTML coding expertise. If you can select text and find/select files on your computer, you have all the necessary skills to create iPad web apps.

So what is a web app? A web app is a web site that looks and operates very much like a native application for iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch). If you create a web clip of this site on your iPad (instructions here), it will operate in full screen mode so none of the usual web browser controls are seen making it look even more like a native application.

With these Automator Actions and Services installed, creating a web app is a simple matter of selecting text, optionally selecting an image, an audio file or a movie and then invoking the service and using a forms like interface to choose various options.

So far, there are two automated workflows:

1) Create Single-page Web App
EXAMPLES (click on thumbnail images in rightmost column)

2) Create iPad Photo Web App.
EXAMPLES (click on thumbnail images in rightmost column)

To fully appreciate the examples, use an iPad, load the web site, create a web clip for it and then revisit the site using the web clip icon.

Feel free to post your iPad web apps here in the comments. I'd love to see them.

The question of whether eBooks, eTexts, eHandouts and so on can be published as podcasts is an important one for educators, especially if their students are using the iTunes application, if they are using iTunes U to help deliver courseware or if they are involved at all in mLearning. Of course, we are talking about eBooks that are free because there are ample means for distributing eBooks that are not free. In the case of the new iPad, there is the iBookstore although I have not yet found a school textbook for sale there surely that's just a matter of time.

The iBookstore is currently only available via the iBooks.app on the iPad but we will see an iBooks.app for the iPhone and iPod touch as soon as iPhone OS 4.0 is released this summer. Then, too, there are many titles found in the iBookstore that are in the public domain and free. It appears that Apple has taken good advantage of the work of the Gutenberg project. All of these eBooks are in the ePub format which appears to be the de facto standard.

Thus, we're not so concerned about books that are free, in the public domain and have been digitized by Project Gutenberg or books that are not free. What we are concerned with are those free, ePub-based text books, handouts, reprints, and other documents that university faculty might want to assign to their students to read on one of these mobile devices or even on a larger, not-so-mobile computer.

Right now, we can give a qualified "yes" to this question. Here's how it works. Simply include .epub files in the RSS feed that you create for a podcast channel using same conventions that you've been using for .mp3, .mp4, mov, .m4a, .m4b, .m4v and .pdf files. The only thing that will be different is the suffix on attached files. That will be .epub.

Here's what will happen. When you subscribe to this channel using iTunes.app 9.1.1 or newer, the .epub files will become available for download according to the prefs that you've set in iTunes.app. Once downloaded, you will see these .epub files referenced in both the Podcast Library and the Books Library of the iTunes.app. Synchronizing with an iPad, those .epub documents will be placed on the shelf in the iBooks app and identified as a podcast in the list view. Ditto for iPhones and iPod touch devices with iPhone OS 4.0 (summer 2010). All of the features of the iBooks application such as bookmarking will be available as your students read these ePub-based documents.

Important caveat. Currently, iTunes U does not accept the .epub suffix in an RSS feed so if you try to subscribe to a podcast channel via the iTunes U RSS Tab feature, it will fail. However, I expect that this restriction will be lifted once all Apple mobile devices have their own iBooks application. That should be this summer.

To see this in action, subscribe to my eBook Test Channel.