A Star Story
Making my first Apple Book, formerly known as iBook
Creating an ebook seemed like a very daunting task at first. With all the cool interactive elements involved I was sure it was going to be difficult. The story I wanted to tell was one that would educate children on the life cycle of a star. I came up with a story that follows a young star through her life. I named my star Mizar, because it’s the name of an actual constellation but mostly because it rhymes with star. Then I started sketching my story ideas.
Once I had the gist of my story I began wire-framing like I would for any other interactive experience.
Now with some direction, I began illustrating my scenes and characters. Since this is a children's story, the written content was going to be pretty simple and straightforward, the most important thing is the visuals. I went through several renditions of Mizar, my main character.
I then illustrated my background and planets. I wanted all the illustrations to have the same look and feel which is surprisingly difficult to do when your’e working with a custom look and feel.
I was warned not to design in iBooks Author as it is a pretty terrible design tool. Instead I designed everything in illustrator and copy and pasted everything into iBooks Author as separate objects. As I began stitching designs together with scenes I realized that a lot of the story was told with the visuals. I was able to shorten my 16 page book to just 9 pages.
For the interactive elements, I used widgets from Bookry and from the iBooks Author application. Bookry widgets are very cool and very free, however, they aren’t them most reliable. The maze widget I downloaded will sometimes crash.
One issue I ran into was the metadata and how things were displayed. iBooks can be tricky and undependable at times. One tricky thing in iBook is that you have to include a table of contents. My book is a kids story book so it’s not something that would need a table of contents. I had to include each page within a chapter and get the book cover to appear at the beginning of the book by placing it as the chapter art.
With everything ready to go, the last and final test I need to conduct was on an actual human. I had my nephew test out the ebook.
As you can tell from the gif above, it was a huge hit. In fact, we read it 8 times in a row. Creating an ebook is really a very simple process and due to the ease of creation, we can all be digital publishers.
