Pages - Export as EPub format ... the possibilities?

Apple released a new version of Pages last week. I downloaded it and didn't pay much attention for a couple of days. The primary function the update added was to export Pages documents in the ePub format. I thought who is going to use this, to get your documents formatted correctly is going to be a huge pain. Then around Sunday a few articles started trickling out, including a support page from Apple on how to set up your documents for the ePub format. This included a sample document that you could copy settings from to set up your documents correctly. So on Monday I tried it.

This immediately changed my mindset. I believe this is a game changer for the iPad/Phone/Touch. In about 20 minutes I had created a 4 page book from a document with embedded graphics, hyperlinks and video. My excitement over this grew as I thought about the possibilities for teachers and students. For a student to have the capability of writing a story, illustrating it and turning into an eBook in a short period of time really holds a lot of potential. Teachers could turn course syllabi and other documents that they have used for years into books to be loaded on all kinds of devices.

Give us your thoughts ... Join the IEAR NING and post a comment!

Cross posted from the IEAR community ... Thanks @kdumont!

Comments

[Cheryl Davis]

Agree, this is a very wonderful feature and has lots of potential for student authors. Also around the same time that Pages announced its export to epub with video, hyperlinks and formatting, the epub bud site http://www.epubbud.com/ added the ability to embed YouTube videos into an epub file on their site that can be viewed in iBooks on the iPad or iPod Touch. Also epub bud announced unlisted URLs. Lots of possibilities for creative authoring of enhanced eBooks with these new upgrades in Pages and epub bud.

[Harry DIckens]

Using Pages to create ePub documents has been a game changer for me. All of my agendas for iPad sessions are created this way. Now after I finish creating my agenda in Pages, I export the ePub document to my box.net account create a short bit.ly and all of the participant simply download the document. If the are using an iPad 1st generation via the url or with a QR code reader from and iPad 2nd generation or their iPhone or iPod touch with their camera. What a paper saver!