Last week Apple updated their e-reading software to include a new (well really just extended) format for multimedia e-books aimed at the textbook market. As part of that push, they also introduced a new tool called iBooks Author which lets you . . . you know, author iBooks. Apple is promoting the program chiefly as a tool for making textbook like rich media books, but after watching their presentation I immediately thought that it would be a great way to make all sorts of illustrated book content like comics, story books, illustrated noves, and especially a convenient portfolio tool.

Apparently I’m not the only one. The fabulously talented Dani Jones has a post up about her experiences trying iBooks Author making a comic.

The Best part is that Apple is giving iBooks Author away FOR FREE, which puts a few other $500 products I can think of *cough* InDesign *cough* to shame. After watching the apple speech I was all giddy and excited and whatnot, so I immediately downloaded Author and decided to give it a try. Here’s how things went.

The Project – Flywheel:

A few years ago I made an illustrated short story for a class project called Flywheel. It’s written in the style of a series of journal entries accompanied by simple watercolor illustrations. It’s about 20 or so pages depending on how it’s paginated and since I already had the text and illustrations in my computer for the print I made for class I thought it would make the perfect candidate for my first e-book.

You can download a copy of my finished book here:

Flywheel, Matthew Cook.

Getting Started with iBooks Author:

If you’ve used one of Apple’s iWork programs like Keynote or Pages then I suspect that Author will look pretty familiar to you. It’s been quite a while since I’ve used either, but I found things to be pretty intuitive, and thankfully the help file in the program is well written and handy.

When you start you’re presented with a few templates you can work from. I played around in each of them but I ended up using the “Basic” because it had the least formatting for me to remove.

The first thing that gave me some pause was the structure that Author imposes on your book. At the top of your list of pages are 4 sections that are part of every book. The first is a cover which you can populate with your title and whatever images you’re interested in.

The next is an “Intro Movie” which plays the first time you open the book. For an example of this see the E. O. Wilson Biology textbook that Apple uses in all it’s demos; think “flashy to look at once in a demo, but ultimately really annoying”. You can’t delete this heading in Author, but if you leave it blank then it just doesn’t appear in your export, so no biggie.

Next is a Table of Contents. This is generated for you automatically as you build your book. There are some settings to adjust what appears here but as far as I can tell there is no removing it and at the very least it will contain each of your chapter or section pages (more on that later). The formatting is also a bit fixed. You can add images and text to decorate it but basically you get a static for each chapter or section with a series of thumbnails of that chapter’s internal pages along the bottom, each of which is a link to that page in the book. For a visual book it’s much prettier than a list of chapter titles. I think perhaps very handy for a portfolio book too.

The last fixed item is a glossary that lets you add terms and link them to pages in your text. This is more for the textbook side of things so I didn’t play with it much but now that I think about it I wonder if it could be used for something handy like a keyword index. If you don’t fill it out it’s omitted from the final export just like the intro movie.

Under the fixed items is the list of your pages. So on to the guts!

Making Pages:

There were a few things about this that were very confusing to me at first, so let me explain and maybe save you from the same headache. The problem came down to the way Apple wants you to structure your book so that it works nicely with things like the table of contents and scalable text and all the other e-book features. Once you get the idea it makes sense, but if you’re like me and don’t read the instructions it can be confusing.

An iBook is made up of either a series of “Section” or a series of “Chapters” (or a nested mixture of each) so that each section or chapter’s heading can show up in the table of contents and link you to each part of the book. This means that you can’t just add pages to your book, you have to add a section or a chapter first, and then add pages to that section or chapter. That took me about an hour to figure out.

In turn, each section or chapter has a single block of text that snakes through linked text boxes on however many pages are necessary to show all of it. This is so that when a reader adjusts the font or text size the text of the book can redistribute itself properly. When you add an image or a floating text box Author also makes a little anchor indicator that lets you associate that item with a location in the text so they stay in sync.

When you make a new page you choose one of several templates, basically a blank page or one with 1, 2, or 3 columns of connected text boxes. It took me a while to realize that the connected text boxes and the floating ones were not interchangeable. If you want things to work correctly you have to keep your body text in the big linked boxes.

My story is laid out as journal entries, each about a page long, and each headed by a date (so 25th of January for example), so at first I decided to work with chapters. I think this would be fine if my story were longer, but because each chapter is only about a page long this arrangement turned out to be a problem when I previewed things on my iPad for the first time. Instead, I made a single chapter and designed it’s intro page to look like a title page for my book. The I filled the chapter with all 20 or so pages of my book. This worked really well.

Once you get going things are pretty smooth. I cut my text from the original textfile I had handy and pasted it into text boxes, and then dragged and dropped the illustrations into place. The formatting and styling tools are all very intuitive and adjusting the images and flowing text around them is very easy.

Preview, Where Dreams are Crushed by the Realities of eBooks:

Ok, that’s a little harsh. Things weren’t that bad, but there were a few things I discovered when I made my frist preview that were a bit disappointing.

First, and most upsetting, were the fonts. As I said I had laid out my book previously for a printed assignment, and at the time I spent considerable effort finding nice script fonts for the date headings and a legible but interesting body font. On my computer everything looked fine, but apparently fonts are not exported with your book. The iPad only supports about 2 dozen common fonts so all my stylized text was replaced with a crummy substitute font. Rather than take what the system gave me I went back to my computer and restyled the text with something more appropriate.

Another harsh reality on the iPad is the issue of portrait vs landscape views. When you work on your project in Author the view defaults to a landscape format, which feels about like a 2 page spread on a paperback. You can also click a button and edit the way things will be laid out in portrait orientation, but for some reason Apple decided that in portrait view all images should appear as small thumbnails in the margins. Again, very textbook like.

I played around with the portrait orientation for a while trying to find something I liked, but usually when I made something work in portrait it looked ugly in landscape or vice versa, and there is just enough connection between the two versions that I couldn’t get something that worked well in both. I almost wish you could make two completely different versions of the book and just swap them out when someone rotates their iPad. You do have the option of disabling portrait orientation all together and that’s what I finally ended up doing.

Another annoyance I came across has to do with those linked text boxes. I formatted my book as two facing pages, sometimes with an image on one side or the other, but occasionally with a large picture spanning across both. I used the 2 column page template which gives you two equal text boxes and a grey dividing line down the middle of the page. You can see it poking out on this screenshot at the top and bottom.

Well I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get rid of that blasted grey dividing line. At first I thought maybe it was just for visual reference and it would disappear when I exported the book, but not so. You can select the line but there doesn’t seem to be any way to delete it or even edit it’s appearance. You can also edit the template files directly but the same story there. SO FRUSTRATING! I finally had to make thin white boxes on every page just to cover it up.

After the first preview I had some adjustments to make, but for the most part things went fine.

Export, ISBN’s, and the iBookstore:

Exporting your book is very easy and when you’re done you are left with a .ibooks file that you can then distribute yourself for others to install on their iPads through iTunes.

If, however, you want to sell you books (or give them away for free) in the iBookstore, then you have to go through a process of applying to Apple to become a seller which requires some contract signing, and then submit your book for review and approval. I applied for a seller account on the day iBooks Author was released but I haven’t heard back from them yet. I suspect they are a bit inundated with applications at the moment.

Reading about the process however I discovered that one of the submission requirements for a book, even one you intend to sell for free on the store, is a registered ISBN number. If you are lucky enough to live in a country where the government runs the national ISBN database you can likely get an ISBN for your book for free. I however live in the USA where our government  thought it would be wise to grant a monopoly on ISBN numbers to a private corporation that charges around $125 each. Large companies can buy ISBN’s in blocks at substantial discounts, so there are a number of small self publishing websites that offer numbers for less or even free, but with varying caveats. ISBN numbers not only identify your book but the publishing house to which that number block was assigned, which can mean that if you publish under a free or low cost ISBN associated with a publisher it can present legal hurdles if you ever decide to sell your book under another publisher later. My over all impression at the moment is that getting and ISBN is more trouble than it’s worth.

Anyway, you can always distribute your exported book yourself as a download. Well, sort of, you see . . .

License Controversy:

Since iBook Author was launched there has been some controversy on the internet about some of the provisions in the EULA pertaining to what you can do with the books you make with the software. The offending section is this one:

2. Permitted License Uses and Restrictions.
…
B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:
(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution

The gist of this is that you are not allowed to sell the books you make with iBooks Author anywhere but in the iBookstore. Some people jumped to the conclusion that this ment that you would not be able to sell your book anywhere but with Apple, but the important distinction is this: You can still sell the content of your book anywhere, you simply can’t make a formatted version of your book with the iBooks Author software and then sell that formatted version anywhere other than the iBookstore.

I think this provision is pretty scummy, both as a potential author and as a consumer, but it doesn’t mean my work is locked up, just that I have to do a lot more to reformat with a different tool it if I want to use it somewhere else. Because of this provision I would think twice before using iBooks Author to make something I intend to sell.

Conclusions:

I didn’t get a chance to play with many of the fancy eye-candy type features of Author but for the simple sort of layout I was after I was pretty happy with the experience. I’m also excited to try it at a few other sorts of projects. For a few years now I’ve been compiling my portfolio in InDesign and exporting it as a PDF to be printed (at considerable expense) or sent to clients and and studios as an e-mail attachment along with a resume.

I think this would be a great way to make a portfolio I could take with me to a meeting or a job interview. You can also export your books as static PDF’s so I can imagine filling out the portfolio in Author and then using the same files to send out as I take with me.

 

Over the weekend I took a trip to Sarasota to visit Ringling on their annual Accepted Students Day. This was the first time I’ve been on an airplane in quite a while, and the first time I’d flown anywhere by myself before, so to commemorate the experience I took a lot of blurry cell phone pictures. Hurray!

Air travel has changed quite a bit since I last flew. Most of the changes are a result of all the new security precautions, but not all. On my flight from Atlanta to Sarasota the plane was equipped with these video screens in the backs of all the seats. “Wow, keen gear!” I thought for the first 3 minutes. Then I saw this sprite ad again. Then again. Then Again. THEN AGAIN. I was worried I’d have to stare at it the whole flight, but then the little 4-year-old boy in the seat next to me started playing with the unmarked buttons on the bottom and it turns out you can turn the screen off. Hurray for 4-year-olds!

Here was the most exciting part of the flight. It’s kind of hard to make out, but down there somewhere is the florida coastline. This was my first glimpse of the Gulf of Mexico.

And here’s what parts of Sarasota looked like as the plane came in. The airport is right near the coastline.

I’ve heard that when you get off the plane in Hawaii that grass skirted hula girls come out of the woodwork and put leis of flowers around your neck. In the Sarasota airport you are greeted by this 8-foot tall statue 15th century Spanish Conquistador Hernando de Soto. He’s very intimidating.

Hey look! My first encounter with a Floridian palm tree in the rental car lot. *sigh* memories.

I was eager to see the ocean so I drove around looking for a beach. Here’s a little park I stopped at. It goes right up to the water, but no beach x_x. I’d have to try again later. I never noticed it before, but palm trees kind of loom over you.

Another palm tree greeted me at my hotel. I have to say, they were starting to get a little menacing.

The sun was going down, so I decided if I was going to see a beach before I left I’d better go find one now.

And look, I found one. This is called Lido beach (or Lido Key, I’m not sure what the difference is).

The sand was nice, but very different than the sand I remember from California.

I sat on the beach for a while and tried to draw the people walking by, but the sun went down pretty quickly. It sure was pretty.

I didn’t have any swimwear, but I did walk through the water a little and pick up some shells. By then it was almost dark so I had to head back. Tomorrow Ringling!

The Ringling campus is very nice. My only basis of comparison is the campus at KU. Ringling is maybe the size of the main part of the KU campus on Jayhawk blvd, but very few buildings are over 4 stories. Most of the buildings are relatively new, built in the last 5 years or so. There are lots of trees and shady spots and nice places to sit and sketch.

When I got to check-in I was assigned to a small group of 5 or 6 other students and their parents and 2 student tour guides who would be showing us around for the morning. Everyone was very friendly.

The first building we toured housed the Film program and also the technology center for campus. Every student at Ringling is given a free laptop complete with all the software you could want, the gift of an “anonymous donor”.

In the tech center we got a little tour of the server room which houses file space for all the students as well as a very impressive render farm used by the Computer Animation (CA) students to render their projects. The servers are in a very nice server room with hot and cold zones for about 5 isles of racks. I was surprised to learn that the render farm runs windows. The technical director told me that they would like to be running linux, but that the rendering software and plugins they use require windows.

Next we toured the CA facilities. Luckily one of our guides was a 3rd year CA student (that’s him in the action pose) so we got a really thorough tour. In the animation dept they’ve lines the walls with these movie posters, and under each one they list the Ringling alumni who worked on the film. They have posters from just about every animated or scifi action film in the last 5 years.

The animation students spend their first few semesters learning 2D pencil animation, one of the things a lot of the other 3D animation schools (to their total discredit) completely skip over. I was really excited to see what sort of equipment they would have for students and I was not disappointed. Here is one of the animation desks. They have a whole lab full of these complete with backlit metal animation disks, adjustable surface, and a luxo lamp.

There’s a reason the desks are so nice. They were all donated to the school by Dinsey when the Orlando animation studio was shut down. These are the same desks that movies like Lilo and Stitch were animated on.

Our guide said that the 2D classes focus on building animation basics, and culminate in a 15 sec pencil test animation that tells a simple story with a character you’ve designed.

After 2D animation students move on to 3D. The department has several labs full of computers, all PC’s, all brand new, all with tablets, and all with 30-inch screens. The students do their animations in Maya and our guide was kind enough to show us some of what he’d been working on.

Everyone learns skills at every stage of the pipeline, so character design and connecting through study development, then modeling and rigging, texturing, animation, compositing and rendering. Your junior year you develop a final story up through the storyboarding stage, and then your senior year is spent completing a short film for your thesis.

Career services is very impressive. They have this display in their lobby with logos of all the companies that do recruiting and nearly every CA student I talked to was involved in an internship at some point.

This is a figure drawing session put on by students. They organize sessions every weeknight and bring in models so you can work on your skills outside of class.

This is one of the Illustration dept computer labs. Illustration has both Mac and PC’s, everything with 30 inch screens.

I’m still not a fan of those creepy palm trees, but there are lots of other trees as well and most of them have big fluffy beards of this spanish moss that sways in the wind.

This is a shot from the second floor of the Graphic Design dept’s building. They have a very nice (I’m guessing) Chihuli glass sculpture. This building also houses the main auditorium. Speakers come through from all over and include people from the major animations studios who show the students preproduction stuff and even some bits of films and shorts before they’re released to the public.

And a little parting shot of the clouds over Sarasota. A big thanks to our guides (names withheld to protect the innocent), I had a great time.

 

 

Stupendous news everyone, I got a job.

I’ll be working at Bazillion Pictures. Bazillion — or Baz as we like to call it when we’re having our glamorous fast talking hollywood type industry lunch meetings — is a small animation and production studio here in Kansas City. I’ve been interning and freelancing with Bazillion since last summer, so I’ve had a lot of time to get to know everyone. There’s only 8 people on the crew: 2 founders, 5 artists, and 1 project manager. They’re all tremendous characters. I’m starting on along with another intern I’ve been working with since the summer.

Because the studio is so small everyone there is a Jill or Jack of all trades, and that’s a lot of what I’ve been learning as an intern. They do motion graphics, 3D modeling and animation, sound design, print and web graphics, concept art, theater design, and now we’re ramping up a major new push into video games and interactive. How cool is that? I’ve been doing a lot of this as well, and a big part of that has been all the 3D modeling I’m learning.

I’ve already been involved in a host of exciting projects, and I hope to be able to start posting some of the goodies here soon. Needless to say I’m very excited, which ineventbly leads to singing show tunes to myself, which may be driving the cat crazy. I tried to tell her she could be more into it if she would do the choreography with me, but in typical cat style she refuses.

As an artist, I have to say that I feel very lucky to have a real regular job. Doing paperwork feels like a job. Answering phones feels like a job, but being an artist with what I hope will be a steady paycheck—it kind of feels like I tricked some poor businessman into paying me to sit in a room and draw all day. Don’t tell them, but I do it for free already.

Does this happen to other people or just me? Sometimes, just sometimes, someone will tell me where they work or what they do and CLICK! Before they can say anything else I instantly construct for them in my head an elaborate theatrical persona.

I’m always hesitant to share this sort of thing out loud because, well, it’s kind of weird. I think some people might be flattered that I find their jobs (which they probably hate) to be so interesting. Other’s probably not so much. I have a friend who works as a chef at a county jail for example who assures me that the whole affair isn’t 1% as exciting and romantic as I seem to think it must be. Whatever the case, it’s not exactly an impulse I can control.

About a month ago a nice fellow named David posted a comment here to a post I made almost 2 years ago, a collection of watercolor scraps I posted over the winter break of 2008. David wanted to know if he could use one of the pictures (the one with the birds) to accompany a blog post he was writing, and mentioned that he worked for (here it comes) Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections.

Did you ever see that movie The Name of the Rose with Sean Connery? If you haven’t, it’s worth a look. Based on a book my Umberto Eco, Connery is a 14th century Benedictine monk detective who has to solve this series of mysterious murders in a monastery full of ancient texts, all the while trying to evade the serial killer, teach his young novice the value of deductive logical reasoning, and avoid the inquisition. I bring it up because, well, if you worked for Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections, what else could you possibly look like but Sean Connery in a monk’s cowl? That’s right, nothing else!

To tell the truth, I’d never heard of Wheaton College before, so I thought it might be prudent to look them up before I wrote back to poor David/Sean in his itchy robes. BIG MISTAKE.

It turns out Wheaton College is a beautiful and well respected Protestant Liberal Arts college in Illinois (not the problem) with a spectacular collection of papers and artifacts from a rogue’s gallery of fantasy authors (big problem). Do you know what J.R.R. Tolkein’s writing desk looks like? Or how big the Wardrobe from C.S. Lewis’ childhood home is? Or what a box full of Madeleine L’Engle’s photo’s smells like (she wrote A Wrinkle in Time)? I don’t either, but I know a well respected Protestant Liberal Arts college in Illinois where you can go find out. AND NOW I SO WANT TO!

Suffice it to say, kindly library associate David is now 2 or 3 steps away from total nerd demigod (wizard like cape, magic book powers, command of 30 languages, the works). These things happen.

Well obviously I wrote David back and said by all means. His post is up now, it talks about Jerry Kirk, a scholar and pastor who spoke at the college in the early 90′s. In his speech Kirk recounts an anecdote about using the sight of a bird as a reminder to think about God. That starts a whole other chain of interesting thoughts in my head but I’ll save them for another post. Best of all, David gave me an illustrator credit with a link. *score*

Anyway, it’s all a round-about way of saying thanks to David, and hey! I got an illustration posted!

I wonder if David wears sandals, and if they were once C.S. Lewis’ sandals, and if that means David can fly, and if so, does he hide things on the tops of the really high archive shelves, because that what I would do. Just a hint David.

One of possibly several tests posts. Please ignore.

What a sad and lonely state I have left you all in, my non-existent readers.  I know, I know, I said that I would make an effort this summer to make regular publications here a habit, and I have failed.  You must all hate me—if not the fact that you are all figments of my imagination.  <sigh>

But perhaps I can make amens.  Would it placate you to know I come bearing gifts?  Of course it would, and here they are.  Just look around you.  Completely updated and redesigned!  New templates.  New CSS.  New database backend.  New and improved!

Huh?  What’s that?  That snickering there?  Why…can’t you see it?  Well…subtle, yes.  It’s subtle.  Rather subtle, anyway.  But look at that…aaaa…the, um…well.  I mean.

Very well, I suppose you can’t really see the changes.  I mean not on the surface you can’t.  But can’t you just feel it?  Doesn’t it have that ‘new blog glow’ about it?  Doesn’t it? <sigh>

Alright fine.  I can do better.  No, no, I can.  Here, look.  Scroll on down to the bottom of the page.  See that! Ha Ha!  That’s right!  Twitter posts!  A whole new form of up to the minute web technology that I will soon grow tired of and abandon just like that whole silly blogging thin…  Well, I won’t make any promises this time.  But you never know.

Ok ok ok, I know what you want.  Fine, I give in.  You’re right.  It’s the least I can do (I mean after imagining you all up and then building this whole blog for you to read and then spending 4, no 5, 5 whole paragraphs apologizing for not updating it).

Huh?  What’s that?  No I didn’t say anything?  Hey, look over there!  It’s an honest to goodness new feature!  Comments! Now you can be critical even when I’m not around.  Aww, I know.  I love you guys too.  Just try and be civil—I’ve imagined some kids who come by here sometimes and I don’t want to get imaginary phone calls from their imaginary parents.

More to come, I (don’t) promise!

This last spring I had the chance to study lettering and font design with Josh Scruggs, graphic/font/web designer and all around talented article.  Josh keeps a blog called 26Symbols, and recently asked if I could make a guest post about my adventures learning font design.  While you’re there, check out Josh’s fantastic lettering work.  He does that BY HAND.  I’ve seen him do it.