Last weekend I had the opportunity to listen to Meg Wilson present a Classroom 2.0 session on using Pages on the Mac to create epub documents that can then be viewed on iBooks on iOS devices and other devices that can read the epub format. Several of our teachers have been using the method that Meg describes to publish teacher created ebooks to our iOS devices. She did a great job explaining the workflow in Pages and I recommend this session to anyone looking to learn how to create epubs using Pages on the Mac.
Dropbox rather than Sync
One aspect of the workflow that we have used at Lewis is to share the epub books with students via a live link to the epub in a Dropbox folder. Rather than sync our iOS devices with a desktop computer, we place a live link to the epub on our student web page. (We had planned on just uploading the epub files to our student web site but we discovered that our WordPress install will not accept an epub file format. The Dropbox method is a work around.) Students then use Safari on their iOS device and visit the web page with the epub link. By clicking on the link, they initiate a download of the epub file and then are prompted to save the epub file to the iOS device. They are presented with an option to open the epub file in iBooks. By clicking the iBooks option, the epub file is opened and saved within the iBooks application. Below are a few screen shots that highlight the process.
