When you design your book cover, all you really need is your cover image. (A cover size of 600px x 800px works well for iBooks and other book distributors, though other sizes are possible). Ignore warnings Pages generates once the file is converted to ePub. Be sure to check the box to use the first page as the book cover image. You can use a floating image and stretch it to fill the margins so you don’t get a white border. However, I discovered you can violate this rule in one place, the first page, the page that becomes the cover image. That is, images that act like text elements in terms of formatting. Here’s what I discovered and shared with my fellow presenters at ISTE and my team at the recent summer institute.Īpple’s guidelines for ePubs tell us to only use inline images.
Then I spent hours figuring out how to make the cover image play well inside the ePub document and become the thumbnail image I wanted to see on the iBooks bookshelf. I designed a simple cover for the book using Pixelmator on the Mac. Authoring an eBook about the iPad that was destined for the iPad seemed a sensible and genuine way to learn the process. Generating ePub documents from Pages was a new feature back then and I wanted to learn the process. I wrestled with this challenge last summer when I decided to write and publish my first eBook called iPad Academy: Tips, Tricks and Clever Techniques. Generating a full-color cover page without a white background or white borders to sit on the bookshelf inside iBooks is more challenging. Pages makes it simple to assign styles for the title, subtitle, author, and so on. Generating a cover page with a white background using the handy ePub template Apple offers is easy. Essentially, Pages takes a snapshot of all the images and text on the first page, saves it as a PNG, then designates that PNG file as your cover image. When you export from Pages for ePub, you check an option to use the first page contents as the cover. A thumbnail image of the cover page becomes the “book” image on the bookshelf inside iBooks. The topic of ePub book covers came up in our team meeting as we designed a sample ePub resource. See my previous videos for more on iBooks on the iPad.
Both of these formats can be displayed in the iBooks app for the iPad.
Our group began work on “leveraging digital assets for professional development.” Our objectives are to raise awareness of the tremendous resources in iTunes U, offer guides to searching and curating iTunes U content, and then show how to publish these curated collections as ePubs (digital multimedia books) and PDF documents. As part of our work there, small teams designed and collaborated on projects of interest. The ADE Summer Institute is five days of intensive professional development and camaraderie with some of the best educators you’ll find anywhere.
Last week, I participated in the Apple Distinguished Educators Summer Institute in Phoenix, AZ. The topic of this second workshop was using Apple’s Pages word processing and page layout program to create ePub files. About a month ago, I attended the ISTE 2011 Conference in Philadelphia, where I led one workshop on the iPad and later collaborated with four other Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs) on another workshop.