Apple’s education and iBook related event in now underway at New York City’s Guggenheim museum. The company just unveiled iBooks 2 for the iPad which now includes textbooks, but that’s hardly the only important announcement for today. In a bid to make every person a book publisher, Apple has just unveiled a free Mac OS X application, names iBooks Author, that will allow anyone to design and publish their own books on the iBooks platform.

iBooks Author can be downloaded now from the Mac App Store, as we’ve said for free, and the idea behind it is that it brings drag and drop simplicity to authoring multi-touch eBooks. The application comes with a host of templates to get you started though you can completely customize the look of your book. You can enter your text directly to your book’s pages and you can drag and drop photos, videos and even Pages and Microsoft Word documents directly into your book. You also have the option of making your iBook interactive and for that you have the widgets. Widgets add multi-touch interactivity and include photo galleries, 3D objects, animations and Keynote presentations. You can also add your own Javascript or HTML if you are feeling more adventurous.
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