Import your iBooks Author book into Pages for Mac

: June 7, 2024
: Apple

Table of Contents

Import your iBooks Author book into Pages for Mac

Import your iBooks Author book into Pages for Mac

Open, edit, and publish your book in Pages on your Mac.

Open an iBooks Author file in Pages

You have several options for opening your iBooks Author file, which has the .iba filename extension:

In Pages, choose File > Open, select the iBooks Author file, then click Open.
Select the iBooks Author file in the Finder, then choose File > Open With > Pages.
Drag the iBooks Author file onto the Pages app icon.

When importing your iBooks Author file, Pages might prompt you to save some content to a separate folder:

If the cover of your book has a different orientation than the body of the book, you’re prompted to save the cover as a separate file. You can add the cover back to the book when you export the book from Pages.
If your book includes certain widgets, you’re prompted to save the widget content to the separate folder. You can then reuse the content in your Pages document.

If you clicked Cancel when prompted to save the cover and widget content or you can’t find the folder, you can always reimport the iBooks Author file to create the folder with the relevant content.

Edit your book in Pages

You can edit your book in Pages before you export to EPUB or publish to Apple Books. When you view your book in Pages, you may notice some differences. Here are some ways it might look different:

The table of contents is text-based, and can be viewed and edited in the sidebar.
Glossaries appear at the end of your book, and glossary terms link to the glossary.
Images, video, and audio files are imported, but some settings from iBooks Author such as “Plays full-screen” or “Plays automatically” are not available.

Use a book cover

If the cover has a different orientation than the rest of the book, Pages saves the cover as a separate Pages (.pages) file called Cover. To use the cover when you export to EPUB or publish your book, convert it to a PDF, then add it as the cover by selecting “Choose an image.”

If Pages inserted the cover as the first page of your document, choose “Use the first page as the book cover image” when exporting to EPUB.

The image gallery and media widgets appear in your book in Pages like they appear in iBooks Author. Other widgets won’t appear the same way, and are covered in this section.

Pages saves pop-over, scrolling sidebar, interactive image, and review widget content as separate Pages files. The file is named so it’s easy to find. If your book used a fixed layout in iBooks Author, the file includes the page number where the widget appears, such as Page3_Popover. For books based on EPUB templates, files are numbered, such as ScrollingSidebar_5.

Each Pages file incudes all the original contents of the widget. You can copy and paste some types of content from the reference files into the book in Pages. For instance, you can copy the contents of a scrolling sidebar widget into a text box, then adjust the size of the text or the text box to accommodate all of the content.

HTML widgets

Pages creates a folder for each HTML widget that includes a mix of files with the widget’s content. You can access your media files to copy into your book, or you can open the HTML file in a web browser and take a screenshot or create a movie using QuickTime.

3D widgets

Pages creates a folder that includes Collada (.dae) files for all 3D widgets used in the book, along with any texture files. You can open these files in a compatible 3D-modeling application, or you can open the file in Preview and take a screenshot or create a movie using QuickTime.

Keynote widgets

To add a Keynote presentation to your book in Pages, open the original presentation in Keynote, export it as a movie, and then add the movie to your book.

To make it easier to locate the Keynote file, you can find the name of the original Keynote file in iBooks Author. Open your book in iBooks Author, select the Keynote widget in the book, then open the Widget inspector.

Published Date: July 09, 2020