Beatles iBook
Using iBooks Author to create an interactive iBook
With a team of two other students, I created an interactive iBook about The Beatles. With so many directions we could go we decided to focus on four main areas to give an overview of the group. Our sections were named after Beatles albums that went with the chapters content. Meet The Beatles, Beatles for Sale, Magic Mystery Tour, and Let it Be. I mainly worked on The Beatles for sale section that focused on awards, sales, and a timeline.
Interactive Features
Sales Infographic
I wanted to highlight the Beatles record sales since they are the highest-selling group of all time. In Hype, I created a widget that shows how The Beatles compare to the other top-selling artists of all time.
Awards
Using the popover feature in iBooks Author I created a showcase for the various awards that The Beatles won. At first, I tried to display every award won by The Beatles. But this was difficult because of the huge number of awards the group has won. I ended showing a graphical summary of all the awards won while highlighting notable ones with pop-ups.
1 Album
The Beatles 1 album includes every number 1 hit the group had. It is a good way to see how the groups sound changed over time. It also works as sort of a timeline as the songs are in chronological order. I decided to use a Spotify widget so the user could preview the album. Spotify gives this widget as an HTML iFrame code. I think this is mainly meant for embedding on websites, but with a little tweaking, I was able to embed it in our iBook.
Timeline
The timeline was a group effort. We created the timeline as a two page spread in iBooks Author with a seamless background. Our theme was the beatles song “The long and winding road”. The road signs act as popups that show albums released and key events of that year. My group did some really cool animations for the years 1964 and 1966.
Testing
Testing on an iPad helped a lot, all of the functionality worked but there were some cosmetic errors. Things like fonts displaying different on iPad vs iBook author. One of the difficulties of using iBooks author is it is hard to size background elements. There were multiple pages where I didn’t have the background stretching the full length of the page. I was able to fix this after testing.
Conclusion
Overall this was a great experience. My group worked well together and I learned a lot through this process. It was fun to create content on the Beatles and try to figure out ways to visually show the groups sucess.
Spencer Wright is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. This article relates to the Final project in the DGM 2260 (Immersive Authoring) course and representative of the skills learned.
