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jhowell · 07-25-2017, 10:09 AM

There is another thread, started last year, that has some discussion of Kindle in Motion. The first post in that thread links to a Medium post by Jiminy Panoz with detailed description of its features.

I am not a fan of the use of motion in books, but several of the other KIM features would be nice to have in regular books that contain illustrations. Perhaps Amazon will open up the authoring of this content at some point.

Since this thread is in the Kindle Formats subforum, it would be a good place to discuss how KIM actually works. I have picked up some bits and pieces, but a lot is still unclear so some of this is speculation.

All of the KIM books produced so far have been done in-house at Amazon. There is no publicly available description of the format or the tools needed to author KIM. It appears that the input format for authoring is EPUB with proprietary markup created using InDesign. This is fed into some tool which produces the KIM book in KFX format and also a MOBI/KF8 version of the book with (almost) all of the proprietary markup stripped out.

As with all of the new e-book features added by Amazon in the past couple of years, KIM is handed by the KFX renderer. KFX was designed so that new features could be added to it over time and support for KIM was a later addition. The set of KIM features is collectively called Illustrated Layout.

The main concept in KIM is the definition of page backdrops that are anchored to particular text in the book. When that text is shown the backdrop is activated.

These backdrops can contain images, video and solid color. Special markup allows these to be rendered to the edges of the screen and also allows the header (book title) and footer (progress) overlays to be selectively disabled.

Images can have markup describing how much of the image is safe to crop from each edge without losing anything important. This allows images to be rendered on devices with differing aspect ratios without distortion or adding black bars to the sides or top/bottom.

Book text is placed over the backdrop, avoiding specially marked areas (defined as polygons) so that image/video content is not hidden. Text automatically switches to a color that contrasts with the backdrop for readability.

07-25-2017, 10:09 AM	#2
jhowell Grand Sorcerer Posts: 7,109 Karma: 92190133 Join Date: Nov 2011 Location: Charlottesville, VA Device: Kindles	There is another thread, started last year, that has some discussion of Kindle in Motion. The first post in that thread links to a Medium post by Jiminy Panoz with detailed description of its features. I am not a fan of the use of motion in books, but several of the other KIM features would be nice to have in regular books that contain illustrations. Perhaps Amazon will open up the authoring of this content at some point. Since this thread is in the Kindle Formats subforum, it would be a good place to discuss how KIM actually works. I have picked up some bits and pieces, but a lot is still unclear so some of this is speculation. All of the KIM books produced so far have been done in-house at Amazon. There is no publicly available description of the format or the tools needed to author KIM. It appears that the input format for authoring is EPUB with proprietary markup created using InDesign. This is fed into some tool which produces the KIM book in KFX format and also a MOBI/KF8 version of the book with (almost) all of the proprietary markup stripped out. As with all of the new e-book features added by Amazon in the past couple of years, KIM is handed by the KFX renderer. KFX was designed so that new features could be added to it over time and support for KIM was a later addition. The set of KIM features is collectively called Illustrated Layout. The main concept in KIM is the definition of page backdrops that are anchored to particular text in the book. When that text is shown the backdrop is activated. These backdrops can contain images, video and solid color. Special markup allows these to be rendered to the edges of the screen and also allows the header (book title) and footer (progress) overlays to be selectively disabled. Images can have markup describing how much of the image is safe to crop from each edge without losing anything important. This allows images to be rendered on devices with differing aspect ratios without distortion or adding black bars to the sides or top/bottom. Book text is placed over the backdrop, avoiding specially marked areas (defined as polygons) so that image/video content is not hidden. Text automatically switches to a color that contrasts with the backdrop for readability.