Is it possible to co-author books ?

It doesn't matter how you produce your book, but I think one single person has to have the iTunes Connect account/contract to put it in the iBookstore.

iBooks Author also really only allows one person at time to compose text.

Hello Teresa,

I have co written and edited several books, some even with iBooks Author.

Are you asking from a practical point of view as in file sharing and who works on the master file in iBooks Author.

Or are you just thinking about how the names are applied to the book, as in Author, co-author etc?

Regards,

Nigel

teresagarciacirce wrote:

I was mainly referring to the problem of sharing files and/or working both on the same file with iBooks thru different computers.

It's pretty cumbersome, you have to move a single master .iba file, which can be very large, to whichever computer needs to work on the book, via email or dropbox or memory stick. Or give the other author remote access to your computer so they can work on an .iba file which stays there.

Hello Teresa,

You can work in smaller isolated files.

One master iBooks Author File on one computer only — (this helps prevents with common mistakes creeping in with file versions).

Reduce the individual work loads into small individual sections.

Co-workers work on their part of the book and creates this in an identical template file that you each have.

This same work style can be carried out by many contributors and fed into the one master file.

Then the smaller versions can be copied and pasted into the master file either collating the individual sections or even just coping the pages required and pasting them into the area / section / chapter of the master file.

Just remember that iBooks Author can still not move pages around so you have to build in extra blank pages after each area to make moving pages around easier.

If one or more person needed to work on the exact same section of the file at least the smaller sections are easier to transfer and manage.

Using Pages or Keynote is a good way to work with contributing files and then these are fed into the master file.

Especially now with the new sharing functions with pages and iOS 10.10

We have not used this new function ourselves since currently the work flow is commonly in one direction and then fed into iBooks Author in our current project.

Additionally some people using different computer systems such as Linux and so none of the pages and web files work across each other.

So Power point and Keynote work well in this case.

I hope this helps a little but keep asking questions and explain how you are currently working, I might get some tips too.

Regards,

Nigel

Echoing this last post...My husband and I are working on book together, and it seems as though one can copy and paste the chapters from one .iba file to another. We share an apple id. So I have a "master" copy on my computer, Jim has a duplicate on his. We have all the chapters sketched out. As he and I finish our respective single chapters, we'll copy and paste the whole chapter. If it's a portion of a chapter, we'll just copy and paste the selected text. This way we can keep identical copies on each computer as the manuscript fills out. We can either drop the updates onto each other's computer or through Dropbox.

If you're working long distance with someone I suppose that, until Apple has an easy way to do the icloud exchange a la dropbox, dropbox will work for you.

And of course there's always just doing text files, copy paste, etc. But copying it directly from one .iba format to another I think will keep the shape and structure of the book in front of you a bit better.

We won't put the large stuff, ie graphics, media, etc. in until last. That's the way I did it with my "regular" publishers too. Manuscript first, graphics second, although you do plan for those as you go along.

That's the plan so far....