Help with Fixed layout book.

Question

Recently uploaded a fixed layout book to apple. It was rejected, and as usual we received a onliner from Apple - (blurry, pixelated, split across page breaks, etc.) The book is 150dpi and meets all Apple's guidlines. Any suggestions on what else we can try? The book has art running across 2 pages. Is this not allowed?

Answer 1

Okay, after taking a look at the book on my iPad, and digging into the epub file on my Mac, I have a couple of ideas as to why it wasn't approved (and, yes, I'd agree, the one-liner from Apple could have been more specific).
First, on my iPad, the book is not actually opening as a fixed layout book. It's opening as a regular book with your images flowing as text. With the images flowing as they are, many are browen across page boundaries (as you'd see in, say, MS Word, when an image is pasted across a page break), and this is probably why Apple mentions pages being split. In digging into the epub file I didn't see a com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml file, which is where you specify various features for the book, including fixed-layout.  You need this file in the META-INF folder. 
The second issue is actually much larger, and likely the reson Apple responded as they did. Each page in your book is stored as one big jpeg containing both graphics and text (sort of like a PDF), and each xhtml page merely inserts that image in the flow of your book. Apple requires that images not contain text, as this makes it impossible for readers to search the contents or use other features of iBooks such as the dictionary and copy'n'paste.  Text embedded in an image does not scale when zoomed in the same way that standalone text is able to scale and be re-rendered as a true font.
I think you'll need to readdress how your pages have been laid out. Separate the text from the graphics and treat them as independent objects in your HTML and CSS. You might be able to get away with removing all the text from each of your jpeg images and still having "full bleed images" that are simply missing all the text, then layering in the text via HTML.
Hope that helps!