EPUB3 - Float audio pane with page turns

[JSWolf]

eInk Readers are for people who want to read. They don't play Angry Birds, They don't check eMail while you read. They don't tell you you have a new facebook message. They don't ping, bleep, ding when someone else sends you a text/eMail, Facebook message. In fact, they just let you get on with reading without telling you your friend has made his/her move in Words With Friends. This multimedia is going to get in the way of reading. You'll be using a tablet for those sort of eBooks and you will get distracted.

It's all about the words. The videos or audio don't need to be there if the words are good enough to convey the meaning. In fact, having video can ruin the reading experience. How many times have you seen a movie and then read the book the movies was based on only to have the cast of the move stuck in your head instead of your imagination deciding for you?

Even if we are able to ignore the multimedia in the eBooks and just read, we'll still have the bloat of the multimedia in our eBooks. And we won't know which eBooks with multimedia work well without activating the multimedia. I can see the words dying because there's a video to show you what the words should have been telling you.

Multimedia in eBooks could be a huge step backwards. And I see it as something that's a gimmick and I see it being overused and ruining reading.

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Multimedia in eBooks could be a huge step backwards. And I see it as something that's a gimmick and I see it being overused and ruining reading.

I remember not too many years (months?) ago when people were saying the exact same thing about ebooks...."oh, it will ruin reading", "I like the smell and feel of turning a paper page", "authors will never go for it"....

Times change. Technology changes. What is new and fandangled now is old hat and "like, so 10 minutes aagoo" tomorrow.

I completely support your desire for a basic book so that you can read it on your eink device. But perhaps you should allow others to take advantage of new technology/formats/standards if they wish??

[pholy]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Sorry for the thread drift (hijack)!

Not your fault, Turtle.

[_savage]

First, I'd like to complain about the

Second, that's an interesting conversation on the general use of EPUB3, and I agree with Turtle91 here. Both standards are compatible. In fact, when I took one of my EPUB2 books (text only, two illustrations) and converted it to EPUB3, nothing changed at all in file size and as far as the reader was concerned. Just some internal .xml adjustments to comply with the definitions of EPUB3.

Here are a few scenarios though where readers do profit from embedded multimedia:

• Cook books. If you've ever tried to follow text only instructions to make a meal, you've probably noticed that it's a bit difficult; in contrast, having images helps a little, but watching somebody cook helps a lot. Thus the success of cooking shows on TV paired with cook books.
• Educational books. I remember that in school we read about experiments (physics, chemistry) or behavior of animals, cell division, whatnot. Sometimes there were drawings to illustrate these concepts. But once we went off and _did_ the experiments, or _watched_ a movie about cell division, things took on a whole new understanding.
• Archiving. In my case (why I asked the initial question for this thread in the first place) we are using eBooks to archive talks given by a meditation teacher in form of well-formatted eBooks. It's great! We have the original talk, we have the written transcript, and a few images scattered around. You'd be surprised how this changes the whole experience!
• Encyclopedias, documentations, the list goes on...

Yes, these books are huge compared to text only books. Two things to that argument. The EPUB3 standard _encourages_ embedding media, but doesn't require it. That means, you can stream content to your eReader, and most of the time my Nook is on some Wifi anyway. Memory is cheap.

Plain reading books won't disappear, and I will always love picking up real books But I like my Nook eInk to travel with more books. And I also like the idea of being able to do so much more with different media that traditional printed books wouldn't allow me to do. Just because I can Having said that, leafing through a large teatable photobook is something no device can give me.

But I do have the choice and opportunity to pick what I like, right?

And now, please let's go back to the initial question. Can I somehow, magically, "fix" the audio pane to the pages as I read through the flowing content?

[mzmm]

i've never been able to use fixed positioning with interactive elements (audio, video, buttons, etc) in ibooks. apple's ebook forums are full of people searching for the same thing, but i've never encountered a success story there either.

with the particular issue you're having, it may be good to know that an audio/video element will stop playing once you leave the html page it's on - i mention this because it seems from your original post that you only wanted media to stop playing on page-turn.

if you're able to structure the book in such a way that the media is isolated on certain html pages (like if you're using it as intro-media attached to a chapter beginning for example, rather than embedded half-way through a paragraph), then this might be a solution.

otherwise, there's not really much i think you can do, but if you do find a 'fixed' solution i would be really interested to hear!

[_savage]

Thank you nzmm!

Using "position:fixed;" did not work on the audio element, just as you expected. And since the audio contains the chapter content as a read-along, breaking it into a separate .html file wouldn't work well either.

I wonder if there's something with @page that can be done, but I suspect not. At some point maybe Javascript, but that's still some ways in the future, huh? :-)

[mzmm]

i've tried numerous js options as well, but have never had any success using any of those methods either.

but you're right, as CSS3 becomes more supported in e-readers, i hope that there may eventually be a way of defining a fixed position for various elements without resorting to position:fixed. i'm thinking something like

@page {
   @top-left {
      content: media(controls)
   }
}

although it sounds pretty far-fetched now. one can dream.

[dgatwood]

Or just build the page using JavaScript, use position:absolute for the structure, and put the turnable content in an iframe, then do the page turn animation yourself using CSS transforms and transitions. In principle, there's no reason you couldn't....