Mac|Life

How to Add media to your ebook

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Pick a design

Create your document as usual. Pick a template from the Book category (or a blank template if you prefer to start from scratch). Landscape mode works best for image–heavy books, or books that include a lot of media, such as video.

Text and images

If you’ve gone for one of Apple’s templates it’ll have headlines, placeholde­r text boxes and, perhaps, image boxes too. Just replace the text and images (click the photo icon) with the actual content you want to use.

Add your video

To add video, tap the + at the top right of the interface. You can choose ‘Photo or Video’, which takes you to your Photos library. You would choose Insert From instead to add media from Files or iCloud Drive, as shown here.

Move it around

Positionin­g video works like any other object in a Pages document. Tap it and then drag a blue dot at an edge or a corner of the video until it’s the required size. To reposition the video on the page, just drag it to the desired place.

Fix the layout

Video will normally sit above everything else, but we want our text to wrap round it. Tap the Format icon (the paintbrush) followed by Arrange. In addition to text wrapping, you can add a margin around the video.

Add more options

Tap the Movie tab and you’ll see that there are a couple of video–specific options available. Loop causes your video to repeat continuous­ly, while Loop Back & Forth plays the video forwards and then backwards until you click to stop it.

Play it in place

You needn’t export from Pages to see how your video will look in your ebook. Just tap the Play icon shown in the middle of the clip’s preview thumbnail and it’ll start playing right away, so that you can make sure it’s working fine.

Record a voiceover

Adding audio couldn’t be simpler. To add your voice, tap the + and then choose Record Audio. You’ll now see a panel appear at the bottom of the screen with a button to start and stop recording. Tap to get started!

Trim your clip

Pages enables you to trim the beginning and end of your clip, which is handy if, like us, you tend to mess up the start of your recordings. Tap Edit to do this. When you’re happy with it, tap Insert at the top right of the screen.

Move the button

You’ll now see a play audio icon, which you can move around the page. We recommend adding a text label too, for clarity, but make sure that the text box area doesn’t cover the icon, or the icon won’t respond to taps.

Publish your book

Tap the ellipsis (…) at the top right of the screen and choose the Export option. For ebooks, the format you want is ePub — it’s a standard that works on almost all devices. Choose it and provide your book title and author informatio­n.

Check it out

Open your ebook in Books to see if everything works the way it should in the final version. Here we’re testing our video clip to make sure it plays correctly. For big projects, it’s a good idea to keep testing as you go along.

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