Thread: Sigil not saving media as part of EPUB
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Old 07-01-2017, 05:41 PM   #22
Hitch
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JackTrade View Post
As this project is intended for personal/friends & family consumption (otherwise, copyright clearances would be a nightmare), I'm not so concerned about support on a wide range of platforms. What I'm getting more concerned about is the hardware requirements. As I mentioned, I used a small portion of the book to create an epub and imported it into (what I believe is) a fairly robust tablet (Lenovo A10-70f) and loaded it into Gitden Reader. To the limited extent that the media/popup elements worked in Gitden, it appears (now that I have played with it for a number of hours) that the tablet just chocks on the file. It takes a noticable number of seconds for some popup boxes to actually popup, and sometimes the content of the popup appears in the box a good number of seconds later (sometimes after the Close button on the box is pressed). If that's indicative of the hardware needs of a multimedia file like this, it would probably work (to the extent it does as a software matter) only on 2-in-1 tablet/laptop combos with I3 or better/8 GB ram hardware.

Imagine what would have happened had I tried to incorporate a video file as well...
Well, the problem is, you're not making an eBook. You can call it an eBook from now until hell freezes over, but it's not. This is more like that harebrained "Immersedition" thing, that everybody thought was going to be The Next Big Thing, which fizzled out like 3-day old birthday candles on a decrepit cake. Popups, media, yadda-yadda.

The bottom line is: this isn't what eBooks DO. While yes, eBooks are fundamentally small portable websites, they're not multimedia centers that can do everything, and honestly, that's not what most eBook readers seem to want, so there's bupkus development in that direction. The only company that keeps pushing that stuff is Apple, and I'm pretty sure that even they've learned their lesson about the difference between an eBook and an app.

I'm with Red. You need an app, not an eBook. We make eBooks commercially, and I wouldn't take on that project, not for any amount of money, simply because I don't see it working on the available devices. It's not viable. Not in the current state of the industry, tech, etc.


Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed View Post
Warning Heresy Ahead

@JackTrade - if all your 'friends and family' have Android devices you could give them an app rather than epub.

If you get a decent development tool, creating multimedia Android apps, especially for a fault-tolerant, single-platform, closed user-group, is not that hard. Development is easier, hence faster, and more fun than creating multimedia ePubs. And simpler for the users - they just install Jack's Masterclass.

BR
Yup, I'm with him. I can't guesstimate which app creators/framework would work best for you. The guys here will probably have a good list, though.

Hitch
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