Book Palette
By Jumsoft
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Description
With the new, revolutionary iBooks Author app, anyone can create and publish great Multi-Touch books for iPad, including you. Jumsoft swiftly offers you an enhanced experience in book creation with 20 beautiful templates for iBooks Author.
Each template included in the Book Palette app features an assortment of stylish and modern page layouts. You can use them as a starting point and go from there by typing or pasting your own text, adding or removing text boxes, and dropping images or other media.
Although the standard designs included in Book Palette are very polished, you are not expected to settle for default. Most objects in the templates can be easily reshaped, moved, or removed, and colors can be changed. Use a variety of pre-designed text styles or opt for fonts of your choice to format your text for the best effect.
* Requires iBooks Author.
What's New in Version 1.1
- 10 new templates
Screenshots
Customer Reviews
Major Deficiencies of 1.0 Not Addressed
These twenty templates look better than those Apple supplies with iBooks Authors, and the price, mere pennies a template, is certainly great deal. At that price, this collection is a useful buy for most of those using iBooks Author.
That said, all ten Jumsoft of the original templates and the ten additional templates in version 1.1 suffer from the same limitation as those from Apple. Right now Apple seems obsessed with selling textbooks and books that look like textbooks such as cookbooks or travel guides. The result is that, in the end, every one of Apple's templates and every one of the those from Jumsoft are functionally exactly the same.
A quick glance at any of them will show you what I mean. First, there's a two-page spread at the start of every chapter that requires a photo or other image. I've managed, laid out and formatted some thirty books. That means trouble. Trouble locating images that fit the topic. Trouble and expense getting publication rights. Trouble and time making it look good, particularly if you lack the skills of a professional graphic artist. An excellent, well-written novel could be ruined by templates that insist that the author come up with some sort of two-page graphic at the start of each chapter. Do that badly, and a great novel could end up looking cheap. There's no reason for many books to adopt the format of textbooks and four-color magazines. Quite a few books work best if much is left to the reader's imagination. It's the height of folly to think that just because a device like the iPad can do something such as color graphics, that it must do that all the time. This is repeating the silliness of the early Macs, when the fact that a dozen fonts were available meant a dozen got used.
All twenty of the templates from Jumsoft also display Apple's strange insistence on a chapter/section layout that's used only for a small minority of published books. The vast majority of books not only don't have sections, a chapter/section layout doesn't work with them. I'm currently working on a book that's highly experiential and it has some 60 short chapters. None of the templates from Apple or Jumsoft are remotely appropriate for it and none can evey be easily modified to fit. The same is true of most novels and most biographies. Apple and (by imitation) Jumsoft are trying to force many books into formats that simply aren't appropriate. A book's look shoud fit its theme. It shouldn't be distorted simply to showcase an iPad's features.
I contacted Jumsoft after 1.0 came out and suggested that they break with Apple monolythic approach to books and offer a wider variety of templates, particularly templates that focus on good typography rather than flashy, storage hogging images. That concern still hasn't been addressed. This ten new templates are just variations on the previous ten. Jumsoft still does not offer any templates for typical text-centric books, much less a useful selection for all sorts of books. They need to visit a library, check out a wide selection of attractive books, and create templates that match them.
There's another lack. One of the big pluses of iBooks Author is that it lets the author/publisher set the fonts used. That's a great move, but that power needs to be exploited. A Gothic horror story shouldn't resemble a 25th-century scifi and neither should look like a contemporary comedy. All three need font selections, text densities, and page layouts that fit their themes. That's something Jumsoft could do well if they would try, sparing authors a lot of frustration. Jumsoft should also make clear what sort of story a template is intended for. That means fewer theme names that say nothing about the theme's intent (i.e. Glass Cotton), and more theme names that describe a themes intended, effect (i.e. Dark Gothic, Nineteenth Century Romance, Thriller, and Young Adult).
It'd also be great if Jumsoft could come up with some generalized graphics, swirling lines and the like, that could look good used with a wide variety of books. Distribute them by giving each template several chapters, with a different generalized graphic for each chapter. Pictures bloat a book's file size, reducing the number that can be kept on someone's iPad. Simple line art can look as good, its purpose can be more general, and it doesn't bloat a book.
Jumsoft should also address some of the limitations of iBooks Author. It'd be great if they could come up with some clever Javascript (or whatever) that'd add the equivalent of endnotes/footnotes to documents. It's bizarre that Apple is pushing their app as a tool for creating textbooks when it lacks a basic feature needed for textbooks in college and the upper levels of high school. I realize that Apple has no experience in publishing, but that's not excuse for not talking to anyone outside the giant textbook publishers.
It'd also be great if Jumsoft would create dual templates, one for those with normal vision and one, looking much the same, for those with vision problems. That'd fix one of iBooks Author's other limitations. The books it creates have a fixed font size in landscape mode. Done right, tweaking the formating to suit the larger type, these parallel large-print templates wuld offer authors easy way to create a large print edition that doesn't look as ugly as most large-print print books. It'd be win-win. Apple would sell more iPads. Jumsoft would sell more templates. Authors would sell more books. Readers with vision problems would get a book they can read that looks great.
To summarize, these twenty apps are a good start, but they're only a start. Changing the pictures, fonts, color backgrounds, and text layout (one column or two) isn't really creating a wide variety of templates. Jumsoft still needs to create a more varied selection of templates. In particular, text-centric books need templates designed by professional typographers.
--Michael W. Perry, Seattle
I Agree With M. W. Perry
Everythig he stated is true. Why not allow the writer to handle their own chapters and images!?
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- $9.99
- Category: Graphics & Design
- Updated: Mar 07, 2012
- Version: 1.1
- Size: 51.3 MB
- Language: English
- Seller: Jumsoft
- © 2012 Jumsoft
Requirements: OS X 10.6.6 or later
