Strange iBooks navigation

[Dwayne Smith]

Hi all

I posted this on the Apple Discussions site, with no helpful response. I have every expectation of greater success here.

ePubs I'm creating for the iPad are behaving in a strange way.
This only happens in spread view (iPad held landscape) not in single page view (iPad held portrait).

If I close an ePub part way through chapter 2 (say 'pp 8-9') and then reopen it, it opens at 'pp 8-9' — this is expected behaviour.
Then, if I use the slider at the bottom to drag back to page 1 and then turn a page (flick), iBooks navigates straight back to 'pp 8-9' (but the slider at the bottom says it's 'pp 2-3').
If I then flick back a page, the numbering at the bottom reverts to the correct page numbers. That is until it gets back to where 'pp 2-3' should be, then it displays 'pp 8-9' — and the cycle continues.

If i drag the slider back to page 1, then close and reopen the book — behaviour returns to normal.

This is the only apparent problem with my ePubs, which pass ePubCheck and whatnot.

Any ideas most gratefully accepted.

d.

[JSWolf]

iBooks is not normal and buggy. Give Bluefire Reader a try and you'll find it behaves just like ADE does on your computer/laptop.

[Dwayne Smith]

Thanks for the info Jon.

I'm not really concerned about my own reading experience. I'm more concerned about how others will interact with the eBooks I'm creating for the iTunes store. I'm assuming that a significant proportion of users will simply download iBooks and go with that as their reader.

Anyway, we've just decided to run with them as is. It's quite a specific bug which few users will encounter. Our books are short picture books for kids — not many people will stop in the middle of the story and then later slide back to the title page to start again

Have a good one

d.

[wannabee]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

iBooks is not normal and buggy. Give Bluefire Reader a try and you'll find it behaves just like ADE does on your computer/laptop.

Quite true if it's just text that you are presenting. Unfortunately ADE on the PC and on Bluefire doesn't display all the colour formatting from inDesign which so many of us new ebook designers are expecting to see.

For all the brick batts iBook gets it still displays my books with a WOW from the people who pay me. Where as ADE on the PC leaves them scratching their head wondering why they pay money for someone to make ebooks.

[toddos]

Originally Posted by wannabee

For all the brick batts iBook gets it still displays my books with a WOW from the people who pay me. Where as ADE on the PC leaves them scratching their head wondering why they pay money for someone to make ebooks.

Here's a thought -- focus on editing and basic formatting and people will understand why you're paid to make ebooks. Fancying it up is a waste of time when there are fundamental errors with the book, and if the editing is solid and the layout is competent you don't need bling to justify your job. Feel free to get fancy with some dropcaps or chapter headers, just so long as those of us who prefer good content can still read the book without your ego getting in the way.

[wannabee]

Originally Posted by toddos

Fancying it up is a waste of time when there are fundamental errors with the book, and if the editing is solid and the layout is competent you don't need bling to justify your job.

What I was trying to get across was that if the code conforms to the basic ePUB versions of W3C specifications it would be nice to see it displayed as coded.

The ADE display seem to ignore a lot of code which is displayed nicely in Calibre, Browsers and iPads.

More and more authors are wanting to get their publications on Amazon and iBooks and some of those books are not novels.

Attached is an example of what I'm talking about.

[toddos]

You have a valid point that most epub engines are broken in some way or another (some more than others). However, there's "simply broken" and then there's "doesn't display exactly the way you want", and the two are extremely different. Your examples show "simply broken" -- ignored bold text (though I wonder if that's an encoding issue on your end, as I'm pretty sure ADE understands basic formatting concepts like "bold"), poor table rendering, etc. Missing colors IMHO fall into the latter category, and that's just something you have to deal with. Ebooks give the reader control, and authors/editors/typesetters will have to get over having pixel-perfect control over their books just as magazine editors had to learn to embrace the ambiguities of HTML or die from obsolescence.

I could live without the colors (and would prefer not to have them, even), so long as core rendering functionality like tables and bold were handled properly.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by wannabee

What I was trying to get across was that if the code conforms to the basic ePUB versions of W3C specifications it would be nice to see it displayed as coded.

The ADE display seem to ignore a lot of code which is displayed nicely in Calibre, Browsers and iPads.

More and more authors are wanting to get their publications on Amazon and iBooks and some of those books are not novels.

Attached is an example of what I'm talking about.

Are the attachments the very same ePub? You do know that iBooks has some oddities to it and you can program your ePub to work within those oddities and thus, they don't work well with ADE because iBooks is actually more broken in terms of conforming to the ePub standard then ADE. Bluefire uses ADE. have you had a look at the ePub to see if it conforms or is trying just to look good in iBooks?

If possible, can you post the ePub that made your attachments?

[wannabee]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Are the attachments the very same ePub? You do know that iBooks has some oddities to it and you can program your ePub to work within those oddities and thus, they don't work well with ADE because iBooks is actually more broken in terms of conforming to the ePub standard then ADE. Bluefire uses ADE. have you had a look at the ePub to see if it conforms or is trying just to look good in iBooks?

If possible, can you post the ePub that made your attachments?

It's the same ePub displayed in iBooks and Bluefire. I can't post the books unfortunately. This is an extreme example of the differences. Usually ADE will display the styles but I'm not sure what did to break that here, yet displaying them in non ADE media works OK.

[JSWolf]

have you looked in the CSS to see if maybe you left out a semi-colon? That's a common error in ADE.

Can you post the ePub with just those pages then since we already have screen shots?

[wannabee]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

have you looked in the CSS to see if maybe you left out a semi-colon? That's a common error in ADE.

Can you post the ePub with just those pages then since we already have screen shots?

That will be a test for me. I've been doing them in windows 7 on the work PC. Right clicking to zip and unzip and they validate. From everything i've read you don't the same luck on the Mac. Time to test those scripts members were posting.