The Academy for Teaching and Learning

As a special treat today, I have a lovely guest post for you from Bryan Blakeley regarding the new iBooks Authoring tool. Bryan is a graduate student in history at Boston College, a graduate assistant in educational technology, and, incidentally, my husband. A big thanks to him for covering this for me, and I hope you all enjoy.

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I recently had the opportunity to visit the Apple headquarters here in Boston. They invited several educational institutions, both higher ed and K-12, to discuss use of the new iBooks Authoring tool. The seminar was designed as both demo and workshop, as we heard from their engineers about use cases they had envisioned as well as viewing a few examples of ebooks created by the educational community. It was clear that they were anxious for feedback from those of us who had started to work with the software.

I really like the idea of ebooks. As I recently wrote, I think the opportunities are spectacular for the integration of rich content in ebooks. Apple’s iBook Author provides this integration in a WYSIWYG fashion. Everything from slideshows to 3d graphics to video can be easily embedded in iBooks with just a few clicks. Importing content from MS Word documents is a snap. A small range of templates provide a simple point of entry for novices, and HTML5 widget support is provided for those looking to integrate customized content presentation (including network-aware content). In short, this is a very user-friendly desktop publishing tool.

There are problems here, however. The first and most glaring issue for me is cross-platform compatibility. Not only does iBooks Author require a Mac running OS X Lion to run (which is not terribly surprising), but the iBooks themselves can only be read on an iPad. Notice I said iPad and not Mac – iBooks produced through the author cannot even be utilized on a Mac! When building an iBook in iBooks Author, there are some widgets that don’t even run in the Author tool, but instead require you to push your book to the iPad to quality check. As at least one person in the workshop mentioned, Apple has already built an iPad emulator for the Mac, so why doesn’t iBooks work on this platform? The Apple engineers were either unsure or invoked Cupertino secrecy to dodge this particular question.

Let me make something absolutely clear: I respect Apple people. Their products are beautifully designed and generally well-executed. Their control over both software and hardware allows them to fine-tune their products in a way that others cannot match. The fact that this integration also presents certain business opportunities is simply a fact of life. The iBooks Authoring tool serves at least two purposes for Apple: attracting content to their distribution network (aka the iBook Store) and selling iPads. Though one would like to see iBooks on other devices, and especially other tablets (especially Android tablets), this makes very little sense from Apple’s perspective.

This leads me to two main observations about the iBooks Authoring platform. First, it cannot realistically serve the publishing needs of a device-agnostic institution. Unless educational institutions mandate purchase of an iPad for certain classes or disciplines (as some are starting to do in Business schools), then the Authoring tool will be of limited usefulness. This leads to my second point: this platform may be more broadly applicable to K-12 models. Some of these institutions have begun to adopt the so-called “One-to-one” model where each student receives an iPad when enrolling in a particular school. In this case the institution mandates device choice and can generate content specifically for students using this device.

In sum, the iBooks tool is a slick desktop publishing app that easily integrates multimedia content, but I think it will have limited usefulness in higher education as long as it remains proprietary and device specific, or as long as institutions stay device-agnostic.