It is done. It isn't painful, but it isn't trivial either. I was unable to publish the stories individually - I could have fought with iBooks Author to try and get it to like my format - but ultimately I gave up and used its format. You have a choice of writing a chapter book or a text book. So I took the five published stories and made a short chapter book. The import from Word per chapter was easy enough. It even kept additional formatting (the list and font in Smackdown.) But I could not use my stock book cover that I have on Play or Kindle. There probably is a way but it was not obvious - I didn't see any over "default" covers so it is possible. There are some quirks in the text edit for titles - it doesn't provide a mechanism to insert a newline, and if you split it, it looses the multi-line information when it gets pumped into iTunes Producer. It was funky again when picking the device to publish to: one choice - iMac. One unfortunate thing about the BISAC codes - you can only pick one subject. iTunes Producer was trivial to use - but the publishing region is funky - if you select "world" it will not add it as a region (bad HCI Apple? No interaction feedback? No!?) So, to select all regions, you have to select all regions! The previewing tool was decent but the tab chapter view wasn't obvious (use the left and right arrow keys, don't click.) It looks like it was designed for gestures. Anyway, I'm going to splurge and see how it really looks on my iPad.
My brief summary: if you are starting from scratch iBooks Author is a cool studio. But if you are just importing existing books, its not great.
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