Footnotes?

Yes, actually iBooks calls them Study Cards and by default all Glossary Terms are added. You can uncheck it in Study Options, but that is where your "footnotes" will end up, along with the term you highlighted to get to it. It really is designed for a Glossary - not ideal for footnotes.

@ Nysus

Far from ideal indeed. The way I did it (and I only have a few footnotes), was to make bookmarks from the words next to the superscript numbers, added the notes to the end of the chapter (as a numberd list), and made the notes bookmarks as well. Just give them different names and you can make as many bookmarks on a page as you like.

Now you select the superscript text (I also included the word before it, otherwise your tapping needs to be too precise) and you link it to the correct footnote (bookmark). I also selected the footnote and linked it back to the word before the superscript in the main text (which also is a bookmark now).

Afterwards all this text is red and you loose the superscript, but you can change this back to black (doesn't show up in iBooks Author, but looks fine when in preview-mode on the iPad) and superscript. Now when you tap the superscript (and word next to it) you jump to the footnote. If you tap the note you jump right back to where you were.

I agree this is a clumsy hack, which is very labour intensive, but it does work (if you have onaly a few notes per chapter).

@Maarten van der Smagt

This doesn't seem to work with Image captions. When I highlight text, the bookmark option is greyed out. Is that also your experience?

Long ago, before personal computers, I worked in the educational publishing industry as an editorial manager. What Apple seems to have done is to design a piece of software that comes very close to how we made books in the 1970s (like cutting up galleys with scissors and pasting the pieces up to make the pages). True, textbooks then, did not have footnotes. But if they did, they would have been treated just as they are now on print-on-paper books. I'm writing a history book, not a text book and it has lots of footnotes. If I were going to make a printed book those footnotes would appear at the back of my book in their own section, either organized as endnotes of discrete chapters or by reference to the pages on which the footnotes appear. Of course this flies in the face of what we are able to do in Pages or Word. But until Apple's developers make footnote lookups as they have evolved in the electronic age instead of an artifact that is as old as Gutenburg, my footnotes will have to be in their own section. (oops I guess that's actually a new 'chapter' in iBA isn't it?)

@CrassPip

I haven't tried any footnotes in captions myself, but image captions are definitely something entirely different than the main body of the text, so my guess is this would be my experience too. BTW my main issue with images is that they don't show up in portrait mode, not even if a caption is added, if the template style is in 'preface' which in my view is the best layout foe book pages anyway.

This means I will have to use inline images, but they don't allow for captions...

Ahh well, back to the good old Pagemaker (remember that?) method of having images and separate text blocks for captions, that are grouped and fixed to the page position. It defeats the purpose a little bit, but it will probably work...

I do hope that Apple intends to address the footnotes question directly. When it comes to academic texts at any level, the lack of footnotes by which sources can receive proper attribution can be a real deal-breaker. Authors can be subject to charges of plagiarism if the rules aren't followed according to industry standards. Work-arounds are not really enough.

Isn't there any way to create tooltips in iBooks Author? This would be much more user-friendly than sending readers to another page and then back again.

An interesting idea but given that this thread began on Jan 20 and the last comment before yours was on Feb 3, it would seem that no one has found a decent work-around. Apple has yet to respond either. Of course you can include footnotes easily in Word on your PC and save your footnoted or endnoted manuscript as a PDF format, However, you can't move that PDF to a Mac with footnotes intact.

I had high hopes for iBooks Author. Right now my new MacBook Pro and my iPad, both of which I purchased specifically to create my ebook are now sitting on the shelf unused. The reason? Because my manuscript is full of endnotes which are critical to my work.

At least, Apple has made beautifully designed cases for their products. I enjoy looking at them every day as I work on my book, typing away on my Dell desktop computer in Ms Word 2007.

Macs and iPads are really aimed at those who want to view pictures, hear tunes, and connect with each other. iBook software which involves writing, formatting, and reading is further down on the update list. I hope you are young and patient enough to wait for improvements. I am sure they will come, eventually.

I've never had a problem with footnotes or endnotes on a Mac and that includes a book I completed last year which has 1,000 endnotes. Perhaps the problem is Word. I use Nisus Writer Pro.

After I wrote my previous post, I discovered that someone is working on Javascript pop-ip footnotes for ePub, but perhaps the better option is to go for Bookpress.

Sorry! I should have said Pressbooks!

I had not heard of Nisus Writer Pro before this. I checked out their website. I will download a trial version and test it out. Thanks, Peter!

At least this gets the footnotes into a place available to interested readers, and not for uninterested readers. : ) But it does get mixed up with the other glossary words.

And, it does not get me an automatic superscript ref. number. For those of us struggling with inserting mateiral, or section and paragraph order, that is a serious issue.

iB Author can keep track of figures, tables, interactives, and a host of other items, but not footnotes or endnotes?

this has gotta change. Shall I trust in the wizards of Cupertino? Guess I'll have to. When is the next version of iBooks coming out, and/or the next version of iBooks Author?

Just checking in to see if the footnotes issue has been resolved in a subsequent release of IBooks Author but I guess not...

Obviously this is not a priority with Apple. Except that YOU CAN'T WRITE A TEXTBOOK WITHOUT FOOTNOTES!

I have put all my publishing house that were set to use ibookauthors on hold because of the footnote issue. We work primarely with Academic books and the footnote issue costs me a lot of time, resouce, and money. I really hope Apple is addressing this issue. Otherwise, ePub formats is gonna keep being my only option.