iBooks Author offers beautiful layouts, stunning colors, multimedia components, and impressive interactivity (through the Review widget and other features). These are all wonderful steps up from a traditional textbook. This new system may be considered revolutionary by some. Yet from the results of my early exploration, I am afraid that a real component of revolution has been missed. I hope I am wrong, but...
These new iBooks do not appear to allow HTML widgets that dynamically pull content from other internet sites.
I have tried adding various HTML widgets to an iBook. The ones that work seem to be those that are completely self-contained. The standard Dashboard Calculator widget works fine within an iBook. Regrettably, it seems that any that need to pull from an external server or feed do not.
The promise of adding HTML widgets was very exciting. I envisioned them as dynamic portals opening users to a vast universe of content and interactivity--that could be embedded amongst the static content of an iBook's pages. Integrated polling websites, embedded RSS feeds, or any up-to-date content an instructor/book-builder wanted to incorporate would make iBooks truly engaging, interactive, and completely malleable to needs of the student.
Sadly, when a student opens one of the new iBooks on Day#2 it will look pretty much the same as it did on Day #1. I realize that hyperlinks to external content are allowed, but having the content within an iBooks' page change automatically over time would be truly magical and powerful. Hyperlinks within digital books aren't anything new, self-updating pages would be.
I think I understand Apple's decision on this. If an iBook produced with iBooks Author is to be evaluated for acceptance to the iBooks Textbook Store, it can't be a moving target. Otherwise a page whose content was completely appropriate at the time of approval might have a dynamic page that later includes something entirely inappropriate.
Please don't mistake this critique as ingratitude. iBooks Author is a piece of software that allows me to do things I would never have been able to do. It also cost me nothing. I just wish that the dynamic potential of self-updating HTML widgets could be allowed for iBooks not intended for distribution through the Apple store.
Many iPad fans will find Alan C. Kay's 1972 paper A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages to be very interesting. While at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Kay imagined the Dynabook. Much of what he envisioned seems to have found a place in reality in the Apple iPad. I'm a demanding person, though, and I want even just a little more "dyna" in my iBooks.
Back to sports, Ted, the revolution has been averted.
