Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
Amazon really missed the boat on that one. They put a lot of development effort into that and then just dropped it.
[...]
It's too bad that they just threw away all of that work. My guess is that there was internal infighting and the Kindle in Motion group lost.
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I think similar to a lot of these HTML5 <audio> + <video> gimmicks, I think the stats proved they just don't sell. Actual real life readers just don't care about a lot of that crap.
The Digital Reader is always writing articles about yet-another-publisher coming out with "the next big thing since sliced bread":
- INTERACTIVE EBOOKS
- Playing train noises while you're reading The Orient Express!
and then a year later... yet another article on how that company went under... only for a new one to pop up trying the same exact thing, repeating the same exact talking points!
Side Note: Although what Amazon IS doing right:
Don't they sync the audiobook versions along with the Kindle versions? So if you purchase both, you can follow along?
Also, Amazon's Auto-generated Captions for audiobooks (oh boy, what an idiotic court case that was!). (Android 10 is bringing auto-generated captions built into the OS soon... Watch out Google, the copyright maximalists are coming for
you next!)
Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
The "motion" part seemed like a gimmick to me, but there were a lot of other nice features in the Illustrated Layout that underlies Kindle in Motion.
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Illustrated Layout allowed mixing reflowable text with images in a way that allowed wrapping around arbitrary shapes with user selected fonts and sizes.
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So like a "Hybrid Fixed Layout". Now the way you're explaining it sounds a bit better. :P
Wonder how it was actually coded inside.
Side Note: What's also just frustrating to me is MathML (as you've stated again in
the Kindle Publishing Guidelines thread).
Does anyone know of an actual book for sale that actually has MathML in it yet?
Side Note #2: (And I forget, can big publishers actually have access to this?) ONE thing that would be helpful for some self-publishers is limiting certain ebooks to ONLY be read on specific Kindles (or KF8 or higher).
I love the fantastic backwards compatible support Amazon does, but there are just some ebooks that are not possible to be read on KF7... heavy math is one of them.