iBooks as outliner and information manager

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 18, 2018 at 11:05 AM

For some reason, an article I was reading on iBooks Author prompted me to experiment with the latter’s capabilities. And rather like Scrivener, what you find, if you start playing with iBooks Author, is a remarkably powerful information management tool, that also happens to be capable of exporting its contents as PDF and ePub files. (As well, of course, as actual iBooks.) And it’s got a fairly powerful search function, too, albeit more like something you’d find in a word processor than in an information management tool (such as e.g. DEVONthink Office).

The outliner part? Well, chapters, sections and headings are all treated as levels in the left-hand navigation bar.

It’s not entirely unlike Curio in general feel.

I haven’t played enough to decide whether it’s a genuinely viable tool for info management (I would need to create or load up a sizeable document to find out, and while it does import ePub files, it doesn’t appear to import anything else; however, I do have a few large ePub files somewhere about, so I’ll dig them out and experiment further). But an intriguing discovery, nevertheless.

Of course, like most Apple software, it’s enormous, taking up at least 400 MB on its own. So that’s a bit of a disincentive: nearly twice the size of Scrivener, and about 7 times the size of Curio…

Cheers,
Bill