How I made a multimedia ePub (mostly) on my iPad

I’m doing two presentations this week on Elementary use of iPads at MADPC and Peers Forum Summer Institute. I looked at this as an excellent opportunity to try out some new toys (or apps, in this case).

I’ve been in contact with Dan from Red Jumper about features I’d like to see for his amazing app, Book Creator ($4.99) for some time now. Book Creator lets you create ePubs on the iPad. In the last version, he added audio recording, which I really enjoyed using with first graders. Dan offered me the chance to beta test the next version of Book Creator, which includes one of my most-requested features: video import. I looked at needing to create a new presentation as an excellent opportunity to put the beta through its paces.

I also downloaded Paper (Free to start, but $7 to add all of the brushes) some time ago and haven’t really had a good opportunity to try it out. Nobody would confuse me with an artist, but I can’t get enough of fun drawing apps. This one has a beautiful interface that makes some clever use of multitouch gestures.

First I got to work on Paper, figuring out how I wanted to lay pages out and playing with some ideas. I broke out the ZooGue stylus/pen (free) that I recently acquired, since it has a bit of a finer tip than most of the other styli I’ve tried.

To do my drawings, I’d first use a grey pencil to lightly sketch out the basics. Then I’d use the watercolor paint to color it in, followed by black marker for outlines.

After I had done a drawing, I’d save it to my photo roll and then import it into Book Creator. I wanted my pictures to all be the backgrounds for the pages in Book Creator, so that’s why they went in first, although it’s pretty easy to move things to the front or back.

Next step I needed to import the videos and movies, which is the part where I needed some assistance from my computer.

When I’m at work, I upload as much of my pictures as possible to our school Flickr account and our video to the school YouTube account, and then I normally eliminate them from my laptop so as to save room. Fortunately, they both allow you to redownload later. I generally tried to download and then email the files to my iPad, but some of the videos were too big for Gmail, so I compressed them in QuickTime to cellular-appropriate video and THEN emailed them. I first tried DropBox, but when I loaded a video in the DropBox app, it didn’t give me an option to save it to my Photo Roll.

Once I had everything on my iPad, getting stuff into Book Creator was a cinch. I then added my text and some audio recordings explaining the projects. I was pleased to see that Book Creator now supports adding audio from your iTunes Library.

Final steps include naming the file, and then exporting it, once to iBooks, and then (after multiple revisions) to DropBox, so that I can share it with all of you. Download it here. Please note that at this time, these ePubs only work properly in iBooks. As of a few months ago, I couldn’t find anything else that read them correctly.