Shoo Rayner is a professional who does children’s books.
This is his website (warning: autoplay music; click Stop button when there!)
He found out about iBooks Author by accident and has done two videos about it.
This first one I had to do myself. I ripped his longer video and trimmed it down to the demo of the finished book. I had to. There were six minutes of non-book material preceding it and WordPress now ignores the code to jump to the relevant bit in the video.
There was something odd about that book. Did you notice it?
The cover is color. The interior illustrations are uncolored. That’s still thinking in print. Color pixels are free!
This next video is what led up to the book. Dig it: He gets so excited and so engrossed in it that day turns to night:
And this is an interesting video about iBooks Author ibooks versus Kindle Format 8 (KF8) file creation — and about how antiquated the print publishing-based industry still is when dealing with getting an ISBN:
This is all the realization of what I said back in 2009: Apple Will Break Open The Digital Book Floodgates
You will not need a developer to create a digital book.
Notice had he immediately jumped in to do this book with iBooks Author. Notice how there is no ePub version of that book, despite him having a Mac and Pages. It was only iBooks Author that let him jump in and do it.
This year is going to be very interesting for digital books and xBooks.
Mike Cane’s xBlog 
The reason it’s black and white and thinking print is because it’s a legacy print book. this is the first time that heavily illustrated books can be turned into ebooks. Kindle is still reflowing and so machining a mess of the book.
I have two titles just waiting to get to work on. I’ve been waiting for this to do original ebooks and now there is a market and a distribution system.
like you say, it’s going to be a very interesting year – especially for illustrated books.
I look forward to more from you. Subscribed to your YouTube too. Good luck.
You may not need a programmer, but still might need a 3D artist and Dashcode developer if you want the fanciest interactive elements.
I was skeptical until I watched the videos, and now I’m really impressed with iBooks Author.
OTOH, I’m still left with the impression that this is just the first step, and I think we haven’t even begun to imagine the implications. Especially those ISBN guys. Whoa. “10 working days!!” “They probably have quill pens.” Priceless.
IA 1.0 is 1.0. Expect it to incorporate a lot of things that once required a dev and Cocoa to create. All those fancy things that have been part of eBook apps will be incorporated into it. Want to include a game? Easy widgets to build and animate it. Etc. Right now, JavaScript can be incorporated into it, and we have yet to see examples of what that can do.
Absolutely love the enthusiasm of Mr Shoo-R.
I am still hoping to secure a literary agent and go down the trad route…but it’s great to know of the ibooks route if I decide to take that.
Building animation widgets with Tumultco’s Hype to make a pop-up ebook concept this week. This application has recently added an iBook author widget export. Exciting and creative times ho!
Has anyone got any good links to iBook author widgets that I could play around with?
Watching this carefully! Thanks for those pioneering this trail.
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For teachers’n’parents Interactive multi-touch book – here is a free promo code WAL6PERLYRF4 https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/twinkle-twinkle-little-star/id571672332?mt=11. https://t.co/SuNpYG7E …
This may help to see what we did!
Ian George Bolton is a parent/teacher author app designer who has written this fun guide on teaching pre-schoolers their first words in English through activities, games, songs, rhymes, poems and short stories. The ibook twinkle, twinkle, little star has over 100 illustrations and contains cartoons and audio files.
Follow @iangeorgebolton or @2bandcheese