The iBooks version of my new book, The Inn of God’s Forgiveness and Other Hymns for the Progressive Church, is now available from the iBooks Store through iTunes. On most iPads, the music pages themselves will be rather small, but you can always access the pdfs here for printing.

I usually use a Kindle myself, but my son reads books on his iPad, so I was able to test it using that. Apple has an interesting free app for creating iBooks: their iBooks Author. I spent a few hours with this, and used it to build the first chapter of The Inn of God’s Forgiveness.  I really like pop-up footnotes, and with some labor I was able to make that work with iBooks Author.  It wasn’t easy: I had to create separate little graphics for the footnote links (a little .png for “[1]”, and another for “[2]”, and so on).  But the result looked nice and worked well.

After some reflection, however, I decided not to go that route.  The books produced by iBooks Author are fixed-layout things.  But most of the people in my church who read ebooks do so largely because they can change the font size and read the book with large print.  For that, a plain old .epub works better.  So that’s what you get from the iBooks Store if you buy this book.  It doesn’t have the fancy pop-up footnotes, but it can be read at different font sizes.