Note: With the June 2014 release of iBooks Author, the procedures discussed here no longer work. Good luck with your iBooks Author encodes.
In my upcoming webinar, Encoding for iBooks Author (register here), I claim that “by the lessons learned in this webinar, you’ll be able to include more minutes of videos in your iBooks, or the same number of minutes in a much smaller footprint.” To prove the concept, I created an iBook with seven video files that you can freely download here. By practicing the techniques I’ll demonstrate during the webinar, the seven files I produced (195 MB total) were about 400 MB smaller than those produced by iBooks Author (591 MB), with no visual difference. Click over to the main article to see the complete analysis. Click here to download the free 800 MB iBook.