Want to make a multi-touch ebook for the iPad? Then you need to pick up "Take Control of iBooks Author," written by digital publishing pioneer Michael E. Cohen and now updated for iBooks Author 2.0.

Apple's free iBooks Author publishing software gives you tools to create a visually attractive ebook on your Mac, for readers using iBooks on the iPad. Beyond standard text formatting, you can insert slideshows and interactive illustrations, add audio and video, create quiz questions, and much more. Apple designed iBooks Author for textbooks, but you can use it for other types of publications as well: catalogs, journals, brochures, and more.

"Take Control of iBooks Author" starts by explaining how to plan your multi-touch book project to fit what iBooks Author can do. Next you'll find detailed step-by-step instructions for producing your ebook by customizing Apple's default layouts and arranging your text and media assets. Finally, you'll learn how to publish your ebook, whether for sale on Apple's iBookstore or for free distribution elsewhere.

Cohen helped create some of the first digital textbooks as part of the Voyager Expanded Books series in the 1990s and wrote the user guide for the original Voyager Expanded Book Toolkit.

"Take Control of iBooks Author" has 167 pages and costs US$15. You can learn more at http://tid.bl.it/tco-ibooks-author .

TidBITS has published "Take Control of iBooks Author" in their usual PDF and EPUB formats. However, they also put several chapters from the beginning and end into a free sample multi-touch book called "Take Control of Getting Ready for iBooks Author." When you're reading "Take Control of Getting Ready for iBooks Author" on your iPad, the media examples are fully functional. You can play a video, view an image gallery, tap an interactive illustration, take a visual quiz, see the Keynote widget, rotate a 3D image, scroll a sidebar, and even make a Cheshire cat fade away. Learn more at http://tid.bl.it/tco-getting-ready-for-ibooks-author-11 .

To read "Take Control of Getting Ready for iBooks Author," you can either download it in Safari on your iPad and then tap the "Open in" controls to move it into iBooks, or download it on your Mac (or Windows PC) and sync it to iBooks via iTunes.