Jumsoft’s Year 2012 Begins with Book Palette

Are you a journalist, a copywriter, or an offshore plough mechanical technician who works on an oil rig but has always harbored a secret dream of being a published author? Are you an actual published author who would happily stuff your entire publishing company into a packing box and send it to the farthest, most deserted island on the map? Do you have a Mac? If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, you must have already heard about iBooks Author, Apple’s stunning new application for creating and self-publishing gorgeous books for iPad. Maybe you’ve even downloaded it for free. It’s that easy these days.

If you have the slightest idea of what the Jumsoft team is doing for a living, you might also suspect what comes next. Yes, it’s been less than a week since Apple announced iBooks Author, and we already have an answer to it: Book Palette, the first set of templates for iBooks Author available on the market. Actually, we almost had it ready within 24 hours after the announcement, but “almost” doesn’t count—does it?

So, the first version of Book Palette gives you 10 templates for creating various e-book styles—from glossy business publications to a traditional cookbook featuring a chef, his chef’s hat, cravat, and all. Even better, the set is more than likely to grow, and you will get all future updates from the Mac App Store for free.

All templates contain the full range of standard section and page layouts provided in the iBooks Author app, including covers, chapter pages, text pages, tables of contents, glossary pages, and more. There are lots of different text styles for different book elements, such as body text, chapter titles, captions, references, etc. You can select these styles with a single click, which will help you keep the look of your book consistent.

You can easily recolor, move, or remove most elements in Book Palette. Type or paste in your own text, add and remove text boxes, change the fonts—basically, do your own thing. Stock images are easily replaceable with your own photos or pictures. Gallery, video, and other widgets featured in iBooks Author are very neat and also have a matching look, which you can change for your own liking.

You can take a look at Book Palette samples here and purchase it for $2.99 here (the link will take you to the Mac App Store). Just make sure you have downloaded and installed iBooks Author first! Or at least hold your horses with negative reviews if you haven’t

8 Responses to “Jumsoft’s Year 2012 Begins with Book Palette”

1. yovko says:

   February 2, 2012 at 11:04 am

   Make it available worldwide, pls… I cannot buy it (from Bulgaria).
2. Adam Christianson says:

   February 2, 2012 at 9:58 pm

   The US App Store links don’t seem to be working either and I can’t locate it with a search. Did it get pulled?
3. Steven says:

   February 2, 2012 at 11:33 pm

   Looks great, but not yet available in the Mac App Store Netherlands.
4. Michael W. Perry says:

   February 3, 2012 at 1:39 am

   Thanks for the quick work. I’ll be ordering it as soon as I get back home.

   Suggestions:

   1. Despite what Apple seems to think, not all books need to be highly visual. Pictures in particular don’t add to a book unless they’re done by someone with skills many authors don’t have or can’t afford. My main complaint with the Apple-supplied templates is that they’re so heavily dependent on pictures, they look bad without them.

   2. Create templates for text-centered books that have a useful set of paragraph styles for quotes, sidebars and the like. Show us ways to create attractive looking books that are all or mostly text.

   3. Don’t feel you have to distribute all your templates through one app store $2.95 download. I’d be happen to see templates released in categories: one for scientific books, one of consumer books such as cookbooks, one of novels, etc. That’d keep my copy of iBooks author from being cluttered with templates I’ll never need.

   4. For novels, give us templates with different moods. A Gothic novel need to look different from a high-tech thriller. And since in landscape the font size can’t be changed, for some templates you might want to offer and variant version that’s like the standard version but with larger fonts for the visually impaired.

   5. If possible, come up with clever ways to kludge features missing in the current iBooks Author. The most often mentioned deficiency in forums is the lack of footnotes/endnotes. It’d be great if the note only displayed 1-3 lines normally, only expanded when tapped on.

   6. I’d also suggest adding a sidebar reference that’s clever enough to be inline and specially formatted in portrait view but moves to the sidebar in portrait. That’d be great for adding notes to cookbooks, travel guides and the like.

   7. One final suggestion. Your staff must be getting very familiar with how iBooks Author works. You might throw in either a manual or a collection of useful tricks with these template. You might even want to use iBooks Author to publish what you’ve done as a book on the iBookstore. Apple’s own documentation is a bit spartan.

   –Michael W. Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien
5. Michael W. Perry says:

   February 3, 2012 at 2:32 am

   More suggestions. Apple’s themes and those of yours that I looked at have an irritating trait. They’ve got a chapter layout that fills one or two pages and typically requires a pictures or graphics that may not fit the style of the book. I’ve already mentioned a need to have simpler templates. A new chapter doesn’t have to scream, “Hey, I’m a new chapter. Look at me!” It can be more subdued.

   But the problem doesn’t end there. Rather weirdly, all or almost all the themes are built around a chapter and section layout. Textbooks may have chapter/sections, but most books don’t.

   The result can be frustrating for a would-be author. The chapter starts with too much formatting and can look odd when that formatting is toned down or eliminated. The section formatting is often about right for chapter heading, but it isn’t regarded as such by the contents generation. Is there an easy way to get rid of these overblown chapter headings and turn section headings into chapter headings, keeping the contents right? I haven’t found it.

   Also, there seems to be an obsession in these template with having lists at the start of chapters. Again, some textbooks may be that way, but most books aren’t. Given us some templates that are designed to look beautiful without introductory lists.

   All in all, Apple’s template designers seem to have gone a bit overboard in creating textbook templates. You’d do well to give us a greater variety of templates, paying particular attention to templates designed for novels in various genres. Create templates that make the text look appropriate.
6. patrick says:

   February 3, 2012 at 4:47 am

   Not avalaible in France two, the link call the MacAppStore app, but don’t open any page…
7. Nathan says:

   February 3, 2012 at 9:19 am

   The link is finally working:
   http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/book-palette/id497704085?mt=12

   or search for Jumsoft
8. Jim says:

   February 10, 2012 at 3:10 am

   I have your Book Palette. Why not do a template for the Wilson iBook that you can download as a sample from the iBookstore?

   Thanks for moving so fast.