iBooks Author and the iBook Guide to Patent Litigation Graphics

One of the things I love about the work we do at Cogent Legal is having what I like to call “play time.” By that I mean time to sit and play with a new design-related app or product without any specific goal in mind beyond exploring its functionality and seeing what it will do, and how it might be applied for future work.

While traveling over the holiday season, I started playing with iBooks Author, which is a free app from the Apple store to make graphically interesting, touch-interactive books for the iPad. What drew me to the program was the similarity in design with Keynote, another program that I really like. With iBook Author, you can create interactive and media-packed “books” for the iPad without needing to know any coding.

During my trip, I was curious to see if I could transform our online, Flash-interactive Intellectual Property Litigation Graphics Guide into an iPad version through iBook. (The problem with the Flash version of the guide is it won’t play on non-Flash-enabled iPhones or iPads.) The result is an iBook that showcases our firm’s work and helps IP attorneys with ideas for how to present their case. I’ll describe the functionality below to show some of the cool features that an iBook allows.

For attorneys, the iBook offers another way to share information with others in a compelling and interactive way. I believe that interactive presentations and media-embedded documents created for the iPad and other tablets will become much more common in the near future, and the ease of functionality and portability is part of the reason why. At the end of this post, there is a link for this iBook for you to download and view on your iPad if you wish.

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