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IDPF Digital Book 2010: Epub enhanced, interactive and connected (and a question dodged!)
May 25, 2010 | 3:31 pm
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By Paul Biba
Peter Brantley, moderator, Internet Archive; Garth Conboy, eBook Technologies, Inc.; Liza Daly: Threepress Consulting
Brantley: How to present materials that are not text in Epub. Book should be thought of as a place not just a thing.
Conboy: the 2.1 effort will focus on this type of thing. 2.1 tasks include enhanced support for rich media (video) and interactivity, enhanced global language support, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic et al., better article support (newspapers and magazines), need for enhanced metadata, ability to convey page-level layouts and target multiple display sizes in a single publication, annotation support, native supporth for mathematics, enhanced accessibility support. Wnat first draft late this year and adoption 1st quarter next year. Current specs have embedded fonts so can do Hebrew, for example, now. Epub can now do png, gif, jpeg, svg, embedded objects or XML files, audio, video, Flash, HTML5, but reading systems might not be able to render them.
Lisa Daly: Epub can do scripting interactivity. 2.0 standard can do Flash, but is a bit limited currently. Cool stuff happening: CSS3 and supported by many reading systems – rotation(3D or 2D), animation – Alice for iPad could be done in CSS3 and would work in epub and on the iPad. Can combine CSS3 and scripting, but can’t be shown in any current reading system. Geo awareness: can run an application in epub that will take geographic awareness from the reader and display where you are and change the text as you move. Can access accelerometer, camera, orientation text to speech, other web-enabled APIs using scripting. Apple now requires that books be valid according to the latest epub check.
I asked whether IDPF would “certify” readers as epub compliant so the consumer would know what they are getting. All three panelists dodged the question.
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Comments:
When will these gurus and publishing industry execs get it through their heads that the public isn’t longing to add video and irritating Flash-like interactivity to what they read? (At most, they might want to see a short author interview before they begin to read.) They do little more than add enormously to the cost of production of a book or magazine. All this was buzzed about twenty years ago with CD-ROMs. It was a dud then. It’ll be a dud now. People simply don’t like to mix radically different media.
What is needed is an ePub standard that can do as well or better than print and print-like formats such as PDF. Complex, smart layouts that can handle graphics well, embed fonts, include end/footnotes (for student texts), and vary the display with attractive headings and inset text (as with quotes). That’s what we need for ePub 2.1. The glitzy stuff can wait until 3.0, 4.0 or even 9.0 for all the marketplace cares.
Until then, the industry should develop a standard PDF-for-ebooks page size that’ll display well on most ereaders. A 6×9 size should work well with the Kindle and iPad. It’d make it immeasurable easier for publishers to create an attractive ebook from the print original.
Her name is Liza, not Lisa.
Looks like things are about to be turned inside out, I don’t think they really know or care, but perhaps it does not matter.
Michael W. Perry is right in the main. Video and especially flash — give me a break some respect for the world view and concepts capable of precise rendering in text before we turn the whole world into babling media freaks.
On the good side, however, and this may not be a bad thing, epub looks like turning into something of a universal file format. Perhaps you could do a whole website as a single zipped container?
If text was the main focus I would expect TEI, rather than just bits of XML (who knows with CSS3 it just might not matter).
HTML5 (forgettingt the multimedia) is a much better element set for ebooks, that is a definet pluss, and CSS3 is perfect — perhaps when BLIO comes out this will set the standard — I have no loyality to software — all I want is something that scales down, and yet at the top level allows me to make things as book like as possible.
@Michael
It depends upon the content and the context. For most long/short form fiction, yes, I would find video/Flash interactivity annoying.
For a textbook, if it was well done, I would find it helpful. Imagine a Physics textbook with interactive simulations to help get the point across. Or a documentary/history book with short video clips in it of the described events.
Even text can be abused to the point of irritating audiences far and wide but having the possibility of audio, video, animation and interactivity will help make some writers more expressive. The physics textbook example is a good one. We need to be mindful of the fact that ePub can be used for lots of different forms, not just the novel.
It may well be that ePub evolves into something of a universal format, especially if HTML 5 enters its gene pool. I don’t see how that would be a bad thing.