Originally Posted by AppleInsider

Here's a recap of the top tech stories involving Apple

The free iBook, created using the new iBooks Author, requires iBooks 2 on iPad. Simply download and drag this .ibooks document to iTunes and it will sync to your iPad within the iBooks app when you sync it.

Peruse our initial weekly edition (with limited interactivity) and catch up on the week's biggest stories, organized by subject.

Originally Posted by 4phun

Very good AppleIinsider

Originally Posted by 4phun

Very good AppleIinsider

ITEXT EXPRESS TIP

iText Express brings a lot to the table on the Mac when working with iBooks and ePubs.

You can take any web page and dump it to your desktop using Safari and WebArchive.

Change that to RTFD. Make a copy. Examine the copy with a right click View Package Contents to see all the objects on the web page.

You can view and delete advertising and other images and maybe even the .plist. This makes the content a lot smaller in file size. I usually sort by size and delete anything smaller than a couple of KB, just don't delete TXT.rtf.

Change the extension back to RTDF to view in iTextExpress again. If everything looks right open a new section in iBooks Author drag and drop the RTFD onto the placeholder text. Everything will transfer to your .IBA. Another way to do this is to copy after highlighting what you want in iTextExpress and on the placeholder text click and choose PASTE and RETAIN STYLE to make all the objects and text transfer to .iba.

.iba will create as many pages necessary to accommodate your new content.
Then you can tweak it to display what you want per page.

COPY CONTENT FROM OLD EPUBS

You can open an existing ePub in iTextExpress and copy content including objects to your new ePub.

There is a lot you can do with the Mac OS, RTF and RTFD (unique to Mac), WebArchive, and other tools available to iBooks Author.

MAC MAIL TRICK

I like to take a lot of RSS articles from Mac Mail feed by highlighting them in the second pane where the subject headers are displayed, hitting COPY from the Mac Mail menu bar, and then waiting until all the content is retrieved by Mac Mail to the clipboard. Then I paste the clipboard into iTextExpress and save as a RTFD.That way I can grab a hundred or more pages of RTF content with images, video etc. to work with using some of the above tricks.

PRACTICE

All of the above takes some practice to see what each action does but again I hope this gives some ideas of manipulating content with the Mac so that anyone can create new iBooks with as little effort as possible.

Originally Posted by Relic

Hey why do I have to use iTunes to sync my iBooks? Can't I just download them directly to my iPad. Again this is where not having a MiniSD card really sucks and a filemanager to organise those files to how I see fit. I Would love to just be able to store all of my iBooks, Magazines, eBooks, Videos, Music, Documents, ect. onto a external memory card for easy sharing between devices, backup, more storage, blah, blah. Here's hoping that Apple will include one on the next revision of the iPad or Students are going to have to purchase multiple tablets. Maybe they can go home during lunch and sync with iTunes for their afternoon classes. \

Originally Posted by digitalclips

You can, I just did! I am curious why you didn't try it?