Publishing to iBooks

We've been aware, for a long time, of teachers publishing their work via iTunes. The work is available for download, looks professional and is easy to access. We've downloaded work by Lee Parkinson, Mark Anderson and others. It's something we aim to do more of too (when we get time to).

More recently, we've become aware of iTunes being used to publish children's work. Our inspiration came from the work by Cormac's class.

In 2015, we tried to get the children's work from one of our classes published to iBooks. But, we failed. Here's why. The children wrote their work in Google Docs. or Word and exported as a PDF that we then converted into an ePub. Apple would not accept this file. We couldn't work out some of the requirements of the uploading process. We gave up a little too quickly.

On a more positive note, here's how me made it work this year and what we'll do in the future...

1. The children all wrote their stories straight into Book Creator. 

2. These stories were then shared to Google Drive as a PDF and an ePub. 

3. The teacher took these from Google Drive (read each one for safeguarding and assessment) and collated them for uploading.

4. Individually, each one was submitted to the iTunes Store using iTunes Producer (only available for Mac OSX). Apple are particular about file sizes and dimensions for ePubs, front covers and page samples - read the requirements.

5. The first book took 2 days to appear live on the store. By the time the last few books were submitted, they were live within hours.

6. These books were then shared with the children's homes via a QR Code in their Reading Journal. As not all parents have access to the Apple devices, the stories were also uploaded to a public Google Drive folder. 

7. The children have enjoyed seeing their work online for others to read. Many have come back with stories about which members of their family read their work and where. It's not the most simple straightforward process, but it's well worth it. And, it gets easier with practise.

Please take a look at our work. Download at least one and let us know what you thought of it. 

@ThisIsLiamM Well done to you and all your class. Make sure to check iTunes Connect to get statistics on how many and where u get downloads

— Cormac Cahill (@CosmicCork) March 4, 2016