Sunday, January 22, 2012

More Thoughts re iBooks Author

After exploring iBooks Author and downloading the sample book chapter from Life on Earth, new concerns unfold.
  • The Life on Earth download is an example of one chapter, yet the file is almost 1 gigabite (GB) in size and took 44 minutes to download to the Mac this morning.  According to iBooks Author, books uploaded to the iBookstore can be a maximum size of 2 GB or less.  
  • iBooks Author help also notes that users with iPads that use the 3G network cannot download books larger than 20 MB. 
  • There certainly will be a learning curve to develop or access copyright free graphics and media to use in the iBook.  It is challenging to get quality resources for a print book, much less an iBook.  
I would like to create a couple of electronic books.  Guess I will have to use the "start simple" philosophy and practice with the templates in iBooks Author.  This topic would be a great one for the MERLOT/Sloan Emerging Technologies conference this summer.  Hopefully, we will see some papers for proposed presentations submitted.

2 comments :

  1. I just came across your post here as I googled nursing education & iBooks. An iBook based nursing curriculum would be a dream come true (sadly I will not see such improvements before I graduate next year). Please keep on exploring the area so this dream may be reality for future generations of nursing students!

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  2. Thank you so much for your comment. I could not agree more. Nursing changes so quickly unlike the arts and humanities. I promise to continue to explore so that we can bring iBooks to our courses. There are so many rich and wonderful learning resources in MERLOT (http:www.merlot.org) and YouTube that could be incorporated in iBooks. I do hope that your dream will be a reality!!!

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