iOS: A lot of Interactive text for ebook - ios

Question

We're making an app and going to write and include a lot of text. I want to make the text as appealing as possible, like adding movies, images, nice headers, etc...
I have about 100 A4 pages of text, and will be adding more, so I must find a good way to organise it, and make it easy to modify.
How would you go about doing this?
I thought about these methods:
1. Put each chapter in a txt file and add tags (e.g ) for different elements, and then parse the text in the app with TextKit to layout the elements.
2. Make a PDF for each chapter and display it.
None of these seems very good. I looked at iBook author which seems nice, but I can't seem to find any possibilities to export and include the material straight into the app?
Is there maybe some other software that lets you build the book, and then export it in some nice way so you can parse it in iOS?

Answer 1

I recently was facing the same issue and we decided to go with RTF files. They are highly customizable and you allow the user to be able to copy the text which is nice. Plus text is always rendered clearly and RTF files keep an application small. Using PDF's can make an app unnecessary large.
They are also very easy to read:
NSString *fileName = #"impressum.rtf";
NSURL *url = [[NSBundle mainBundle] URLForResource:[fileName stringByDeletingPathExtension] withExtension:[fileName pathExtension]];
NSError *error;
NSAttributedString *attributedString = [[NSAttributedString alloc] initWithFileURL:url
options:#{NSDocumentTypeDocumentAttribute:NSRTFTextDocumentType}
documentAttributes:nil
error:&error];
CGRect paragraphRect = [attributedString boundingRectWithSize:CGSizeMake(_textLabel.frame.size.width, CGFLOAT_MAX)
options:(NSStringDrawingUsesLineFragmentOrigin|NSStringDrawingUsesFontLeading)
context:nil];
UpdateFrameHeight(_textLabel, paragraphRect.size.height);
[_textLabel setAttributedText:attributedString];
The only thing we didn't do is implement images right into the RTF's. We inserted spaces in the text files where the images would go an then added them as a subview to the textview.