So, it’s a few days since Apple once more set the Internet abuzz with a ‘game-changing’ app launch and at last Twitter has calmed down a bit as people take stock of what iBooks Author can actually do. I can see from the hashtags I follow that there have already been a fair few blog posts on the subject but I wanted to make up my own mind before reading what others had to say.
Of course, you need a Mac and an iPad to fully ‘play’ with the author. Having both, I duly spent a fair few hours ‘messing about with it’ on Thursday evening. With the permission of a colleague, I took her M.A. project (on #eltchat), which she published on her blog and used that to try out Author.
As a desktop publishing program (DTP) it is certainly easy to get to grips with – a series of menus and toolbars make turning the blog work into a ‘book’ very simple. I guess it will take a little longer to master the finer points but in a matter of minutes I had chapters, images and video all in book format. Being able to constantly look at how the final version would appear on my iPad screen as I went along was a boon. Fair play, Apple, it certainly is easy to produce professional and multimodal work.
Having completed my first book, the task of submitting to Apple for iTunes was relatively easy, though made slightly more complicated by me wanting to submit to a category that doesn’t quite fit into the others; perhaps this is a metaphor for the ELT profession as a whole. However, a few clicks here and there and Apple seem satisfied. It took a day or so for the book to appear in iTunes, but it is there, and should you want to, you can download it. Of course, you do need an iPad to read it, though it is possible to share it with people as a PDF.
So, is this enough to make it game changing? Well, it may be in mainstream education but I think it will be a fair while before it makes a difference in ELT. For a start, how many of your students own an iPad? Or for that matter, how many of you / your schools own a Mac (and a Mac running Lion at that)? I can see the main publishing companies having a look at it but I think it might be a while before their coursebooks go that way, especially with the rather strict and somewhat greedy EULA that Apple have that basically gives them all ownership of anything uploaded.
I can see it perhaps finding a place with the small publisher, and it may be the ideal platform for something such as the round project (though, again, the EULA may prove off-putting). A lot of people lost in the moment began to dream of publishing their own course material – certainly something that could happen but remember that having access to DTP doesn’t give you access to an editor or people to help you shape your work. You may find producing a coherent interactive coursebook is a lot harder than you think.
I can definitely see it being a professional way to share texts with students, grouping them together in a book keeps them tidy, for one. As a teacher trainer I think it would be great to be able to put all my handouts from a course like CELTA into one book that a trainee could download. Likewise, instead of simply sharing slides from talks I can make interactive books for iPadded attendees to download. Though, since I constantly reference work on the Internet and use sites such as YouTube, I dread to think of copyright implications. Maybe I’ll just stick to collating ELTchat stuff.
However, one thing it might well change is the student project. As with so many of the tech tools we recommend, perhaps the most immediate thing to do with iBooks Author is put it in the hands of the student. Encourage collaborative learning; let them produce their own work. Even if the end result is a PDF rather than a work in iTunes, Author opens up a world for students to work together to do professionally produced projects and the processes that the students use working together in English may well, in the end, turn out to be the real game change.
Posted in 
