Bookry Blog | Books that Break Boundaries

‘The Slightly Annoying Elephant’ nominated for Booktrust Award

We’re delighted that David Walliams’ The Slightly Annoying Elephant Multi-Touch book, published by Harper Collins Children’s Books, has been shortlisted by the Booktrust Best Book Awards in the ‘Best Tech Stuff’ category.

The eBook, which was developed Bookry, is the only finalist in this category to be created using Apple’s iBooks Author software with HTML5 widgets. The special edition includes great interactive features like read along, auto play animations, tap animations with sounds, learning activities, social sharing, iPad shake and tilt elements, and reader personalisation. You can learn more about these ground-breaking ‘firsts’ for iBooks Author in this special blog.

Highlights of the book also include narration and extra character voices provided by Walliams himself (tap on the elephants and other animals to hear his hilarious one liners!), plus stunning illustrations by artistic genius Tony Ross, which have been carefully adapted and animated for the iPad.

It’s now up to children to vote for their favourite on the Booktrust awards website. The final deadline for votes is 20th June and the winners will be announced during Children’s Book Week on 2nd July 2014.

Create a Simple Quiz in 5 Easy Steps

The Quiz Builder widget is a flexible tool that allows you to create easy to use quizzes in your eBooks created with iBooks Author. We want to show you just how easy it is to create a customized quiz widget that feels right at home in one of the free iBooks Author templates. The tutorial is broken down into these 5 easy steps:

Styling
Adding questions
Setting grading options
Summary pages
Receiving quiz responses

Lets get started. First open up iBooks Author and choose the “Classic Text” template from the Portrait section of the template chooser in iBooks Author.

Now that we have our template lets look at copying the style into the widget. Firstly we need to grab some images from the book so that we can reuse them in our widget. The easiest way to do this it to take a screenshot of graphics from the book.

You can take a screenshot in OSX by pressing cmd, shift and 4 at the same time. Once you’ve pressed this combination your cursor will change to cross-hair. You can now drag an area of the screen to take a picture of it. Once you’ve finished dragging the area that you highlighted will appear on your desktop. Why don’t you take a practice shot?

Now that we know how to take screenshots, we can grab some assets from the book. Firstly we want a standard header for our quiz so create a new blank page, type in ‘CINDERELLA’ in the red title text box and screenshot it, along with the gray line underneath. Next, delete everything so that you’re left with a blank page and then take a screenshot of the background. That’s it! We can now use these to make our widget blend into our book. (more…)

Create ‘Guess the Word’ puzzles for your iBooks Author titles

Our fantastic new ‘Guess the Word‘ widget lets you create fun, challenging puzzles for any type of book. To win, readers need to guess the correct word from the picture clues and a group of jumbled up letters. As well as pictures you can also opt for just a written question. The widget generator includes the following great features:

Easy to use uploader for adding pictures (with auto-resizing).
Mix it up by alternating pictures with written questions.
Add as many sequences of questions as you like.
Optional scoring.
Reader Cloud enabled for ‘saving’ and ‘loading’ for readers.
Customizable background, fonts and colors.

This puzzle is great fun and will definitely impress your readers. There are many places online where you can find public domain images to use with your puzzles. We’ve listed a few below, but as always, make sure you check the licensing on individual images before using them:

We hope you like this new widget. If you do then please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel, following us on Twitter and liking us on Facebook – thanks!

New Widget: Display Code in your eBook

There’s not a lot to say about this widget other than it does exactly what it says on the tin! If you’re writing a book about code and want to include formatted code in it, then this is the perfect widget for you.

Simply upload your code to the Code Viewer online widget generator, which will then auto-magically format the code and add the correct colors for display. You can also choose from a drop-down of themes. Upon the clicking the widget in the book your reader will be able to:

View the code in the correct format, with indents and formatting.
Scroll through the code on the page.
Send the code by email in its native format e.g. for use in a work-along project with the book.
Share the code by Twitter, Facebook and Evernote.

Here is the quickest way to get this widget into iBooks Author:

Visit the free Widget Library page and click on the Code Viewer widget.
Select the ‘Download Now’ button.
Fill in the pop-up (you will need to select a username and password if you are a new user).
Fill in the ‘Static’ and ‘Live’ settings in the online generator and ‘Save’
Download the widget file to your Mac and drag it into iBA.

Featured Title: De Olympische Spelen

With the Winter Olympics in Sochi well underway it would seem apt to feature an appropriately themed title as Featured Book this month. So, we were delighted to recently come across this wonderful and interesting new digital title from Dutch eBook producers Gasthuis Producties.

Created using iBooks Author, ‘De Olympische Spelen’ (The Olympic Games) is an educational eBook which describes the evolution of the Olympic Games from ancient Greece to the present day. It’s packed full of easy-to-read narrative that includes fascinating facts about the World’s foremost sporting event, and reinforces key ideas with engaging interactive enhancements such as high resolution images, galleries, pop-overs, 3D images, video and audio. Readers can test their knowledge of the subject as they progress through the book by using iBA review widgets.

And, there are one or two Bookry widgets too (thanks guys!). The book includes a Maze, Slider Puzzle, Spot the Difference, Drag and Match jigsaw puzzle, Before and After, Interactive Timeline and Sketchpad!

Congratulations to Gasthuis Producties for creating such a visually engaging eBook. You can get a taster for the eBook’s contents from the YouTube video below, and you find out more from the Gasthuis Producties website and on Facebook. The eBook is available to buy on iTunes now in the US store and the Netherlands store.

Also keep an eye out for Bookry widgets in other titles from Gasthuis Producties including a Multi-Touch book about the eleven cities skatetour (De Elfstedentocht) – the famous ice skating race among eleven cities in Friesland.(Available from the US Store and Netherlands Store. We wish them the best of luck with all their titles!

Video Tour of ‘The Slightly Annoying Elephant’ animated iBooks Author title

Why not check out our new video guide to David Walliams’ first interactive eBook for children, published by HarperCollins Children’s Books. Made with iBooks Author and our HTML5 widgets, the eBook features auto-animations, touch-animations, narration, sound effects, activities (Jigsaw, Memory Game, Coloring) and personalization elements.

In addition to the widgets shown in the video, the eBook also contains animations activated by tilting and shaking, plus our In-book photo widget, where the reader can take a photo from within the main story and it appears on the page. All animations and additional activities were created using the awesome Tumult Hype.

Webinar: How to convert files from InDesign to iBooks Author using Bookry

Wednesday 19th February | 3pm GMT

10am EST | 4pm CET | 7am PST

Find out how to easily create professional, engaging Multi-Touch books from your existing InDesign files using Bookry’s new Converter Tool. This non-technical webinar will show you, step-by-step, how to add interactive elements like pop-overs, videos and quizzes to your InDesign files and then output them to iBooks Author. You will discover how our new converter tool can be used to generate interactive eBooks of any genre, such as textbooks, recipe books, children’s books and travel guides. You can read more about our converter tool on Bookry.com.

Click here to register for the free webinar

Add Sound Effects to Drag & Match and Memory Game

At Bookry we try to help you create widgets that are as App-like as possible and one way of doing this is by supporting sounds. We’re in the process of adding audio support to many of our widget generators, the first being Drag & Match and Memory Game with others following soon:

Drag and Match – Add win and loose sounds to your game.
Memory Game – Add a sound that’s played when two cards are matched, plus win and loose sounds.

Our generators support audio files that are m4a format. You can use QuickTime to convert any existing mp3 files into this format by simply opening the file in QuickTime, selecting ‘File’ > ‘Export’ and then ‘Audio Only’. And if you’re looking for some creative commons free sounds, try these websites:

HarperCollins/Bookry Multi-Touch book nominated for a Digital Book Award

The 2014 Digital Book World Conference & Expo is just days away and we are very excited this year as one of our favorite eBook projects from 2013 has been nominated for a Digital Book Award! Pizza Pilgrims, an interactive cookery book developed by HarperCollins NonFiction using iBooks Author, is a finalist in the ‘eBook Fixed Format/Enhanced – Adult Non-Fiction’ category.

Pizza Pilgrims was released in July 2013 and is a ground-breaking debut cookery book from authors and stars of the London street-food scene, Thom and James Elliot, a.k.a. The Pizza Pilgrims. The book contains 100 mouth-watering Italian recipes which all open as app-like interactive widgets giving readers everything they need to cook the delicious recipes and share their creations with others. The widget includes an ingredients list that can be checked and emailed, a scrollable method, sharing options (email, Twitter, Facebook and Evernote), notepad, timer, ratings, reward scheme and more. (more…)

Bookry widgets appear in iTunes ‘Best of 2013’ list

2013 was such an exciting year for us. We celebrated our first birthday, released a bunch of great interactive widgets for iBooks Author and were fortunate enough to work on some truly fantastic books with some inspirational authors and publishers. All of our hard work over the last year has paid dividends as Bookry authors are creating more and more widgets every day. In fact, between January and December 2013 the number of widgets created daily soared by a staggering 700%. That’s totally amazing!

We were also completely blown away when we discovered that many of the titles listed in Apple’s ‘Best of 2013’ feature on iTunes contain Bookry widgets. In fact, 4 out of the 10 titles in the ‘Made for iBooks’ category include them: (more…)