This is not a post discussing the merits of Apple’s iBooks 2 announcement … that has been done all over the web. Instead I did what I typically do when a new publishing engine emerges, I try to publish content with it. So attached to this post is a first shot at publishing some content … and again, as I typically do, I grab content that exists and re-imagine it within the construct of a new platform. This is the same content that was published a long time ago by my team in the IST Solutions Institute via the D3 platform we utilized. I have since published this old content numerous times across various platforms including Drupal, WordPress, and MoveableType. Now it is reborn as an iBook — with a few extra pieces of media thrown in. This is not a full test and it certainly is not a “publishable” piece of work … although the process to get this much content packaged and online was next to nothing — maybe 30 minutes of work.

If you have an iPad you can download and install (I guess that is what happens when you click the link) this text into iBooks 2. The process of getting it onto the iPad seems a little slow and outmoded without the aid of the actual iBook Store. The link takes quite a bit of time to bounce me from Safari to the actual iBooks app on the iPad. I did sign up to be a publisher, but I have yet to receive all the information back from Apple even a couple hours after I submitted it. If I can find a way to become a publisher, this would be much simpler and would probably integrate very nicely with the new iTunes U functionality. I will keep looking at it.