cost-effective enhanced ebooks with epub3

Cost-effective Development of

Enhanced Content

Liza Daly / Threepress@liza

A History of Enhanced Content

I’m going to start with a history of enhanced content

A History of Enhanced Content

2010 -

which is necessarily a fairly short story since enhanced ebooks have only been in the marketplace in a significant way in the last year.

Introducing the revolutionary

Bookbrary 3000™Text

BookBrary

Call me Ish

Our story always starts with an exciting new ereader product.

Introducing the revolutionary

Bookbrary 3000™Text

BookBrary

Call me Ish

With magical Smell-o-vision™Starting at $699

and this product has some new feature which sets it apart from the other ereaders on the marketplace. Now this tech company has a problem, which is that they don’t have any content for their cool new device, so they contact you, the publisher.

And you say, “Well that sounds great but we’re just learning how to make regular ebooks. We don’t know how to make ebooks with Smell-o-vision.”

And the tech company says, “Oh don’t worry about that. Just send us your content...

...and all the enhanced assets, however you’ve got them, and we’ll care of making the enhanced ebooks.”

Exclusively for your

Bookbrary 3000™Moby 2.0

By @melville

Buy Now$39.99

Experience classics of literature as they were

meant to smell.

And they do! And it’s great. And it goes on the marketplace and it’s successful and everybody’s really excited about this great new kind of enhanced content.

Exclusively for your

Bookbrary 3000™

Absolutely no refunds!

Moby 2.0

By @melville

Buy Now$39.99

Experience classics of literature as they were

meant to smell.

So you the publisher say, “Fantastic! We’ve got a lot of content we want to enhance, can we send you more of our raw assets just like the first time?”

But this time the vendor says, “Oh no, that was just for the pilot. Now we need you to send us the assets prepared just like we need.” And they send along a 200 page guide to producing smell-enhanced ebooks.

oobkAnd just when you’re getting started with that process, another new product comes along.

oobk Call me Ish

oobk

And this one is totally new and different from the old one.

oobk Call me Ish

oobkNow with SmellML™

And it too supports smell-enhanced ebooks, but it uses its own proprietary technology.

And they say, “No we won’t accept assets formatted for the other company, we want them like this.”

So what happened? Even major publishers don’t have the capacity to produce unique kinds of enhanced content for each new device or software platform. Smaller publishers have it even tougher, because they don’t get the benefit of the initial free conversion. Is there a cost-effective solution to this?

Don’t hand over assets

Insist on standards

There is, and it’s called standards-based content development. The purpose of formatting standards is to promote interoperable content that can work on all kinds of devices and software. This is the only approach that’s scalable.

3

EPUB3

Editors’ Drafts being produced today

Initial support in commercial ereaders already

Final version in Q3 2011

EPUB 2.0 is already known as the leading standard for ebook production, but has primarily been used with static content. EPUB3 provides more guidelines for producing multimedia and other kinds of enhanced content, and is already being written. Most of the major decisions have been made and at this time the outstanding issues are largely details. As a result, some aspects of EPUB3 are already available in ereaders.

3

Apple:“Embed videos or audio using standard HTML5 tags”

Amazon:“To embed a video inside a Kindle book add a standard HTML5 tag”

B&N:“The following is an example of the video embed tag: <video ...>

Multimedia

In fact as far as multimedia goes the major retailers are already using the same HTML5 tagging...

Multimedia

Format

Audio MP3 or AAC

Video MPEG-4 / H.264 + MP4 AAC audio

- EPUB3 spec Jan 22, 2011

...but there’s been fragmentation in exactly which video and audio formats are supported. The EPUB3 specification simplifies this by requiring support for common media types. Publishers must insist that they will only produce multimedia in the supported formats.

3

Media Streaming

“Video resources, as referenced from Content Documents, may be located in the container or remotely”

- EPUB3 spec Jan 22, 2011

Another new option that’s worth considering is streaming audio or video, which was previously not allowed in EPUB and now is explicitly supported.

Low-costCross-platformEasily repurposed

3

Media Streaming

Streaming has a lot of attractive qualities: hosting streaming media can be very inexpensive, it’s cross-platform because the streaming companies already know how to send the right format to each device, and you can embed that media in marketing material or book trailers or the like.

Low-costCross-platformEasily repurposed

3

Media Streaming

Requires users to be onlineSubject to availability“Authors should prefer locating audio and video resources in the container to allow the user access to the entire presentation regardless of connectivity status.”

- EPUB3 spec Jan 22, 2011

There are disadvantages to streaming: obviously the user has to be online, the streaming site may be down or go out of business, and the EPUB spec says that embedded media should be preferred. But streaming is a worthwhile low-cost option to consider.

3

EPUB3: “Scripted Content Documents”

JavaScript is the supported language.

Interactivity

The most interesting kinds of enhancements are true interactivity, whether it’s quizzes or popups or animation, and support for that is in EPUB3 as well. If an EPUB3 ereader supports interactivity, it must support it using the JavaScript programming language.

3

“There are over 1 trillion unique public URLs on the Internet ... [and about] 30% execute some amount of JavaScript.

...Holy crap that's a lot of JavaScript.”

- Ryan Grove, Yahoo engineerhttp://www.quora.com/Is-JavaScript-the-most-popular-programming-language-in-the-world

Interactivity

JavaScript is one of the most well-known and popular programming languages ever invented. That means JavaScript developers are much easier to find than app developers.

EPUB3 enhancements

I’m going to show a quick demo here of a real-life case where using standards-based enhancements paid off.

EPUB3 enhancements

This is a demo that I was working on internally for a new product.

EPUB3 enhancements

I took three pages from a public domain children’s book from the Internet Archive. I wanted to try different kinds of enhancements on it. I specifically wanted to see if I could recreate the Alice for the iPad experience using just EPUB3. While there are no EPUB3 reading systems yet, Apple recently came out with their fixed-layout option in iBooks which is specifically designed for books with precise layout and advanced CSS3. I tossed the existing demo into iBooks, and it just worked.

[Video demo]

For 2011:One (EPUB3) file to rule them all

So this year, keep up with the EPUB3 spec development, and use that as your guideline in evaluating which enhanced platforms to use and how to produce enhanced content.

For 2011:H.264+AAC for video

MP3 for audioJavaScript for apps

Thanks!

Liza Daly / Threepress@lizahttp://threepress.org