HOW TO

Create an interactive book

Share your story with Pages and Apple Books.

Pages

Documents that stand apart

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Looking for a special way to tell a story or share a memory? Create a digital book. The Pages app now makes it easy to pull text, pictures, video, drawings and audio files together in an interactive book that your friends and family can read with the Apple Books app.

Get started

First create a new document in Pages by tapping the plus icon, then swipe down to the Books templates. From there, you’ll find options for creating a novel, school report, storybook and more. In this guide, we’ll use the Basic template.

A book gets judged by its cover, so take a moment to customise yours: Tap on the first page, then tap the Format icon (it looks like a paintbrush) in the upper right corner. Then select Background > Color to pick a new background colour.

Then swap the images in the template with your own. Simply tap the plus icon on the placeholder image to choose a photo from your album, or use one stored in Files by tapping Insert from... at the bottom of the screen.

Now’s a good time to add the author’s name and title; you can edit any text you see on a page by tapping it. To add pages to your book, tap the plus icon in the bottom left corner and choose a layout.

Enhance your book

Interactive elements like image galleries, audio clips and video make your digital book more engaging.

To add an image gallery, tap the plus icon in the upper right corner, then choose the media tab on the right and select Image Gallery. This gives you a frame to drop your images into. You can enlarge the size of your gallery by tapping and dragging the corner of the frame. We went big with ours.

To add photos, tap the plus icon in the lower right corner. You can also add captions to your photos by double-tapping on the text below the photo.

We decided to give our page a bit more flair by adding a fun shape. To do this, tap the plus icon, then the shape tab (second from right) to see a library of over 700 shapes. To change its colour, tap the paintbrush icon, then pick a new fill colour.

We also recorded a short audio clip. To do this tap the plus icon, select the media tab and choose Record Audio. Once you’re done recording and editing, place the audio file anywhere on the page.

Make an animated illustration

With an Apple Pencil and the latest iPad or any iPad Pro, you can draw an illustration directly in your book – either by tracing an image or starting from scratch. In the video above, we drew a map of Thailand that highlights two great places to eat: Wang Lang Market and Bang Rak.

To add a drawing, tap your Apple Pencil on the page and select the Drawing tab at the bottom. Then use the pen, pencil, crayon, and fill tools to create your illustration. Tap Done to exit Drawing mode.

To bring this illustration to life, tap the drawing, select the Format icon in the upper right corner and toggle on Animate Drawing. Then tap Play Drawing to watch an animation of your creation.

Remember you can also draw using your finger: just tap the plus icon, choose the media tab and select Drawing.

Export to Apple Books

Now that your book is finished, it’s time to export it as an EPUB file so you can view it in Apple Books and share it with others.

Tap the icon with the three dots in the upper right corner. Select Export > EPUB and then share it via email, save it to Files or copy it over to Apple Books, where you’ll be able to swipe from page to page and try out the interactive features.