iBooks Author First Impressions

Yesterday, Apple announced and released iBooks Author – a free e-book authoring tool for Mac OS X Lion. I downloaded and experimented a bit with the application. It's very easy to use, and very powerful.
You can add content via the following tool bar or by just dragging-and-dropping into the project

The widgets are particularly powerful, allowing you to add a number of multimedia and interactive elements very quickly and effortlessly. In a matter of 5 minutes, I was able to create a simple e-book with a fully-functional Keynote presentation embedded in the book, along with a review quiz, and an interactive 3D model created in SketchUp.
This is a game changer for self-publishing!
See the official iBooks Author tour video below.