Quote:
Originally Posted by pshoebri
Hello all,
I'm creating an ebook that has a few technical challenges, hoping you folks can offer some advice.
1. The book is also going to be a print book. It has 100 color illustrations.
2. The illustrations are also triggers that will activate an augmented reality animation when you hold up an AR app on your phone to them, revealing 15 second loops with audio, overlaid on top of the printed book reference image.
We've dealt with the design and technology of these two questions. I'm here to ask questions since the publishers would like us to make an ebook of this book.
The book is designed in indesign right now. Is multi-column, has drop caps, and images are placed throughout the book.
Options include:
Publish the ebook so that all of the animations are built right into the text, and could be activated, played, as well as the book be read. Possibly pages/iBooks could do this? We have to rebuild this completely in Pages to make this happen....?
Output an interactive PDF from indesign? An ePub 3?
Use calibre to translate this somehow?
Hopefully someone here has some experience and can offer some guidance. Thanks in advance!
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Can you elaborate on what platform you envision supporting this? As an
eBook?
I can tell you that it's
exceedingly unlikely that you can achieve any of this with Calibre.
Next, multiple columns per page are not natively or organically supported in eBooks, either ePUB or MOBI. HTML doesn't have tabs and it doesn't have columns. The only way to achieve 'columns' in ebooks is by putting your content inside table cells, inside tables.
For most eBooks/eBook formats, an image
zooms when tapped--it's not a TRIGGER for anything else. For that matter, on the Kindle platform, it's difficult to get users to understand how to tap images for links, because of the fact that the primary action upon tap is zooming--not activating a LINK.
If by "augmented reality animation," you mean video, you can achieve that in ePUB, for iBooks alone, primarily, or browser/web-based reading apps like Readium, but most of the other ePUB readers don't routinely or natively support embedded video. For B&N, you can't upload it b/c they have an upload limit of 20mb. You might have some success at Kobo.
If you mean actual animation, not video...I would suspect that maybe, MAYBE, iBooks might support that, but I don't know another eReader that would. (FWIW, I can tell you that generally and routinely speaking, for most of my authors, they'll sell 1,000 books on Amazon for every one that they sell on iBooks--or fewer, even. And they'll sell 80-ish, on B&N, for every one book that they sell on iBooks.)
Pages is a word processor, not an eBook reader; not sure what you're thinking there.
Then you have filesize issues, based upon the size of the animation elements and the rest of the eBook. eBook readers aren't really small computers; they're limited and you need to be careful about file-size, both due to retailer limitations and user reality/usability.
If you try to do this using Fixed-layout, for Kindle, you won't be able to. Fixed-layout in Kindle (to support columns), can't have interactive linked or active elements. You can embed video--that's it. It also significantly limits your download audience; the book can only be read on Fires, realistically, not the huge eInk audience/owner demographic.
To me, this sounds
like an app, not an eBook. Or an interactive PDF that you sell from a website, as none of the major ebook retailers allow/sell PDFs, including Apple, as far as I know. The columns are HUGELY problematic, in terms of making the eBook work on varied ebook platforms. Almost more than the animation, in some ways.
I do want to point out, ignoring
all the other problem areas, about columns--I don't know if you've exported this file to PDF and then put it on your smartphone and then tried to actually read it--not look at it, not skim, but READ it--there's a
reason that nobody's really tried to address the column issues, a la bootstrap, for eBooks. Trying to put two columns of text, on a 3.5" wide screen, typically, with a quarter-inch margin, all around...that's not a fantastic end-user experience.
If the book is long, the reading experience is not good...it's tap-zoom, pan-scan, read; pan-scan, read; pan-scan, read; page-flip; tap-zoom, pan-scan, read; pan-scan, read; pan-scan, read; page-flip; lather-rinse repeat for however many pages. If you've ever tried to read a large (6x9 or larger) page size PDF on a smartphone, that's lengthy, then you know what I mean.
So...I'd say,
engage an app-building company; make the layout responsive, for mobile; that will get your client
everything that they want and you won't be trying to be Sisyphus, rolling an unwilling rock up an unforgiving hill that isn't going to do what they really want. And the "book" app can be sold on the Droid and iOS platforms.
Offered FWIW.
Hitch