By Lisa Campbell
Apple has announced a new multimedia app called iBooks Author, allowing writers to create their own e-books, in a move to rival Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing.
At an event taking place in New York’s Guggenheim Museum today (19th January), Apple’s Phil Schiller said the free app was “the most advanced, most powerful, yet most fun e-book authoring tool ever created” designed to simplify the process of designing and selling digital textbooks through the iBookstore.
Authors can simply drag a Word file into a book creation space and the app will automatically design the book, creating appropriate sections and headers. Users can then drag and resize images within the text and add terms and definitions – and film can even be added to the ibook.
The app was announced at the same time as a new textbook experience for iPad, iBooks 2, a free app which includes a new ‘textbook’ category.
So far publishers Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have partnered with Apple to supply content for the textbook category, which the company said will eventually include “every subject, every grade level, for every student”.
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