Harry Potter and the iBooks Author

My co-writer Michael Cohen has an interesting piece over at TidBITS on the just published “Enhanced’ edition of Rowling’s Harry Potter series. They were made with the current version of iBooks Author, and are therefor exclusively available at the iBooks store.

Apple’s iBooks Author app is still free; this is the first commercial example I know of using the current version iBooks Author 2.3 ability to export standard EPUB files. Go read Michael Cohen’s full Harry Potter and the iBooks Author article for more details about “enhanced” EPUBs and iBooks Author.

What’s interesting to me, especially, is that this version of iBooks Author looks like academics could use it to create basic annotated editions or course readers, ebooks with limited enhancements, that would be fairly simple to create and still look professional.