Add interactivity to iBooks

- [Narrator] One of the best features of using iBooks Author is how easy it is to add interactivity, because of this wonderful widget drop down menu. You can add these items to any iBook as long as you're starting with a correct template, one of the actual iBook templates. If you start with one of the EPUB templates, down here at the bottom, then when I open it up you'll see that you have a shortened list of which kinds of widgets you can add. Because the EPUB open source format does support HTML5, which these use, but there's some proprietary Apple only coding happening with some of the other widgets.

So they're only supported with an actual iBook to iBook. Let me quickly go through these so you understand what they're for. Gallery, we just saw. That's when you have a slideshow and people can swipe across images. Media is for when you want to add audio or video to your iBook. Review is like a quiz, a sequence of interactive multiple choice or you can even drag to target, like which one is the tree and then you'd drag a leaf to the tree, that kind of thing for a kid's book. You can imbed a Keynote file that plays and has animations right within your iBooks.

You can create an interactive image with little popups that help you identify things. If you have a 3D COLLADA file, you can place one of those in here and then readers can swipe across it to turn it over and turn it around, and manipulate it, which is pretty neat. So if you hve a long chunk of text explaining something, you can put it in a little box to the side of the main text and people can just scroll through it right in that box without having to flip pages. A popover lets you add a little graphic that when people tap it or click on it, then they get a popup dialogue box with text and images in it.

And finally, you can add all sorts of HTML source code as well, for example a source code leading to Google Maps or something. The world of widgets is quite broad. We're going to look at a couple other widget providers in a second, but just let me show you how easy it is to use one of these. I'm going to select the interactive image one and just click on it and it adds an interactive image. Then I can reposition elsewhere on the page. Let's say I want it upper left. And it's saying, what do you want to call this? And I'll say this is my new plant.

And we'll call it the lorem ipsum plant. And then you drag an image on top of here. So we're going to go to our media panel and maybe this cactus is the lorem ipsum plant. Just like that and then you can add little labels to different parts of the image and use this control at the bottom to change the magnification. And whatever you type in here, you can see, this is a spine. Spines are painful.

And you can set how much it should zoom in when somebody taps that. I have a finished one. Let me actually delete this guy on the next spread. And we'll see how it works in preview. I'll click Preview. And it opens in iBooks and I just tap July Blooms. The crimson blooms are lovely and then click again to zoom out, multi lobed leaves. Right, really simple and fun to do. Now you can get other widgets from various places and you can even write your own, because essentially they are HTML5, CCS3, and JavaScript.

The big provider for extra widgets for iBook Author is called bookry.com and a lot of them are simply free to use. Let's take a look at some of their free widgets. Guess the word, before and after, scientific calculator, a check list, more drag and drop fun, you can do all sorts of fun stuff with widgets in iBooks Author. Some of these charge a little bit and also you can even hire them to write custom widget for yourself. iBooks Author is like a playground for people who want to create interactive ebooks.