‘Read to me’ with Siri and Book Creator 5.0

Preview your books with Reading mode

We’ve seen many tweets and pictures of students presenting their books to the class via a big screen or TV. Most students don’t take the step of sending the book to the iBooks app first, so we’ve made this whole process a lot easier by building a reading mode within the app.

Simply tap on the new Play button in the toolbar and Book Creator will switch from Edit mode to Reading mode. You get the full page turning experience, plus all multimedia and hyperlinks will work too.

Read to me

But the fun doesn’t end there. Within the Reading mode there are a whole bunch of settings, including the option to have Siri read your book to you!

What’s more, you can even:

• Highlight words as they are read to you
• Choose from 27 languages and a variety of accents (with the option to download more)
• Control the speed of the voice
• Set the pages to turn automatically
• Choose whether or not to play audio and video

We’re really excited about the ways ‘read to me’ can be used with younger students, and in the foreign language and special education classroom.

Resize audio hotspots

We also added a small but important tweak so you can now fully resize invisible audio hotspots to align with any image or text. Perfect for sound boards and tap to speak books.

See the example below – the audio hotspot is completely covering the word ‘BOOM!’ so when you tap on the word in Reading mode or iBooks it will play the audio effect you’ve added.

We’ve been testing this update over the past month with our wonderful Book Creator Ambassadors. One of them said:

Loving version 5 with the built in publishing feature. The Universal Design features in this app are unprecedented. Thank you!

Now the text inserted into a book can be automatically read aloud, along with the voice notes and any other multimedia. I like that the pages can turn automatically or not. Its important to have the choice.

Can’t wait to share this update with all our teachers and students! Barbara Welsford, Assistive Technology Specialist, Canada

Get Book Creator v5.0 from the App Store now!

And let us know what you think of this update in the comments below.