Why no discussion of HTML as a book format?

[Deskisamess]

I stream video onto my phone every day of my life. For reasons I do not understand Kindle and Google Playbooks reader do NOT support streaming video yet.

A Kindle e-reader is an e-ink device, Greyscale, and not capable of supporting video. They aren't tablet devices. A backlit LCD tablet and an e-ink reader are two completely different technologies.

A user who needs or wants video needs to use the proper tool...a smart phone, tablet, or computer. Wanting an e-ink device to support video shows a lack of understanding of the 2 different screen technologies.

Adding...there have been Kindle books with embedded video since at least 2010. You need a smart phone or tablet to take advantage of the feature.

Here is an example: https://www.amazon.com/Habits-Highly...3184616&sr=1-1

[JSWolf]

What you propose is not an eBook. It's more of an app.

[najgori]

In Reading App Builder you can combine videos with text in "book as app" format.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG8OTmnTazo

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by pittendrigh

Good point. Yes. Reflowable. I hate PDF. When it's flipbooks I kill the tab and find some other way.

pdurrant is right. PDF is the entire kitchen sink you want. And if you create a Tagged PDF, you can even handle the "reflowable" part of it too.

But no PDF Reader supports many of those "enhancements" besides Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Originally Posted by pittendrigh

Video on your phone, inside epub3, is coming at you. I see that locomotive at the end of the tunnel. Coming at us fastly.

lol. That video/audio in ebooks "tidal wave" has been coming for 10+ years, and it's been an enormous failure.

Reality is: Nobody is purchasing it.

See 2016:

• 2016 "Kindle in Motion: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly about Amazon’s New Enhanced Format"

Kindle in Motion "was going to revolutionize ebooks".....

Only 28 books trickled out over the years, and then it dropped completely off the radar. Last one ever released was 2018.

Same story again, and again, and again throughout the years:

• 2016 "Soundtracked eBooks Are Still a Stunt, and Not (Yet) The Future of eBooks"
• 2017 "Hachette, Booktrack Partner to Stave Off the Inevitable Technological Obscurity of Soundtracked eBooks"
• 2015 "eBooks May be Selling Well, But eBook Apps Are Doomed"
• 2015 "Visual Editions Wants to Reinvent the eBook"
• 2012 "Augmented Reality eBooks Are Fraught with Technical Problems"
• 2013 "Poynter Laments About the “Unfulfilled Promise of eBooks”, But Misses the Point"
• 2011 "Enhanced ebooks are dead – Evan Schnittman was mostly right"

You could go even further back, to the 1990s:

• 2013 "What eBooks Looked Like 20 Years Ago"

[pdurrant]

I suspect that pittendrigh is right that an audio/visual enabled ebook format will be useful for non-fiction books.

With tablets, perhaps the time has come.

The question is whether there's a big enough market to justify the investment.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I suspect that pittendrigh is right that an audio/visual enabled ebook format will be useful for non-fiction books.

From what I could gather, much of the EPUB3 audio/video push was from Education publishers.

Think college/highschool textbooks.

And the only store+reader that really supports those types of EPUB3 is iBooks.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

The question is whether there's a big enough market to justify the investment.

For the little guy, probably not.

On the production side:

Creating those ebooks properly is... exponentially more expensive.

You also have extremely large filesizes, since you must embed all audio/video within the EPUB. (Customers are also no fans of this, especially on devices with barely any storage [like phones/tablets].)

This also raises the "delivery fees" through the roof, which causes expensive minimal pricetags.

On the selling side:

These more complex books are usually only enabled for "the big publishers" (see audio/video on Amazon). Self-publishers + small publishers don't get access to the same upload tools, and there's no way to specify: "This book can only be sold to tablets".

... and then you have the enormous customer support issues too.

If you try to venture away from the big-name stores (Amazon, Kobo, B&N, Apple, [...]), that customer support is falling on you, and it is crippling.

* * *

Even the enormous Education publishers have mostly given up on that too. See O'Reilly with "Safari Books Online" closing in 2017:

• 2017 "O’Reilly is Shuttering Its eBookstore"
• 2017 "O’Reilly Responds to Customer Outcry With Explanation, Promise Restoration of PDF Editions"

... and, of course, trying to shift to the "subscription model" instead.

* * *

Anyway, here was yet another The Digital Reader article I found as I was digging through other information:

• 2017, "People Are Weird About Books, and Attempts to “Improve” or “Fix” Books in a Web Browser Prove it"

Yet another reinvention/revolution...

[philja]

I'm encouraged on the one hand by the OP, Pittendrigh, but discouraged by the lack of enthusiasm, even disdain shown by some of the other correspondents.

I thought that, by now, embedding would be a mainstream activity (or even streaming, for larger files) but I'm finding it difficult to locate specific documentation. KDP's guidelines left me confused after a first read. They say that embedded audio and video is not possible for Kindle books but elsewhere they say it is possible for Kindle Editions. I haven't yet understood the difference. Clearly, time and further efforts are required because as Deskisamess says in a post above, there are already some ebooks with audio so there IS a way.

Amazon guidelines do specify how to incorporate code to embed audio and video and how to leave a message for those reading devices which can't cope. This reminded me of the gymnastics required around 2015 to get images to display nicely in older DX kindles - those devices have possibly all retired by now?

I was hoping to add some short audio clips (some 10 - 15 secs) of musical progressions into a non-fiction book. I can just as easily produce a short video clip showing the notes corresponding to each sound. The files concerned are very small so embedding will not be a problem.

I've tried the first audio clips in Sigil which plays them back well but Calibre can't. My older Kindle Fire 6 can't play the audio either. Ironically though, it can read aloud through the passage where the file is and even announce that the audio clip is there.

The epub version displays well in my smartphone and the audio plays but as others have noted, the smartphone format is not ideal for a reading session.

[Quoth]

Clue is in the name. The ebook.

Embedded video and audio are incompatible concepts to real books. The entire point of ebooks is to do a printed paper book in a way that it works on any screen and without the internet or much battery / cpu consumption. You want to be able to read solidly for days without charging.
You get only hours with video. Audio isn't so bad.

Either it's a book or not.

What you describe is better done as an app. It's not an ebook. The epub3, which Amazon doesn't really support, has features that allow multimedia and interactive. IMO that means epub2 is a proper ebook standard and epub3 is trying to compete with web content and apps. A subset of epub3 will work on many ereaders.

But even on the Web much "multimedia" is inappropriate. It's far better to have an app if you want video and audio and interactive. For a while Flash was used (it's not just a video player, but similar to Java with extensions for video, audio and animation). The iOS and Android apps are a better solution.

So either do real ebooks (epub2 and upload that format to Amazon KDP where they convert for whatever Kindle or Amazon App their customer has), or create apps for tablet & smartphone. There are frameworks and tutorials to get you started.

People using eink don't want audio / video. They are wanting to read. People using Apps on a phone or tablet are as happy to load an app as an ebook into the app they installed.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Quoth

People using eink don't want audio / video. They are wanting to read.

For fiction that's certainly true, but for non-fiction and technical books audio and video can be helpful. For non-fiction and technical books it seems to me that PDF is a much better choice. But I know nothing about embedding audio and video in a PDF.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by hobnail

For fiction that's certainly true, but for non-fiction and technical books audio and video can be helpful. For non-fiction and technical books it seems to me that PDF is a much better choice. But I know nothing about embedding audio and video in a PDF.

Those often need 10" tablets.

[pittendrigh]

A few new replies have rolled in to this (embedded multimedia) topic that started almost a year ago.

I mentioned I have written software (python and php) that presents book-like content on a web server. I have Next Page, Prev Page and Return to Last Read buttons. A collapsible table of contents. Next winter (my programming season) I'll add an index-like keyword search using mysqlite. For long pages the Return to Last Read button will be enhanced to remember the Y-scroll position as well as the (cookie based) last read page URL.

My work also embeds video. Seamlessly. Beautifully. No one needs video for reading Moby Dick. But I teach people how to build boats. Video is essential for that (and for many other such tasks).

My daughter is a young tenure-track professor suddenly thrust into a distance learning brave new world. Teaching English Writing doesn't necessarily benefit from embedded video. But, for instance, physics sure does. When I learned calculus-based physics the professors ran projection video frequently. In the distance learning context--which is suddenly, pandemicly the show we all now have--it is indispensable.

PDF is a horror show on anything less than a desktop monitor, because it does not flow. And also because it does not embed video.

Finally. Gutenberg would have embedded video too. If it existed then and if his printing press could have included it.

[Deskisamess]

If I'm reading something that also contains video, if I don't have control over the playback, I won't stick with it.

It's one thing to seek out a video or videos when needing a visual example or explanation. But auto play videos on web pages that can't be stopped send me right to the back button. As does loud background music that drowns out the speaker.

[pittendrigh]

How well the multimedia works in or on your device relates to the quality of the programmer(s) who made it. This is a technology in development.

My wife and I are both birders. I bought an epub on Google Play Books called "What the Robin Knows." It contained embedded audio which was critical to the subject at hand.

My wife used Kindle at the time so she bought the Kindle version. The audio worked in the Google version but in the Kindle version. The technology is in a state of flux.

Multimedia is too big to store on a phone. There is no technical reason phones couldn't stream video (show it but don't save it). But they don't yet. They will. In the mean time if you want to embed video you have to be a programmer. And do it yourself. On a website. As I did.

I sell passwords to online boat building instruction. My book-like software has been a huge improvement. My customers like it.

[Deskisamess]

I'd have to say that the vast majority of people using e-ink dedicated readers do so because they want to READ. Many are most likely similar to me, in that they would prefer to read instructions for doing something, and maybe refer to well taken photos, than watch a video.

If given a choice between reading well written instructions or watching a video, I'll pick the text every time. I don't think I'm unusual.

Multimedia is too big to store on a phone.

Most phones have large storage now, just as large as a top of the line iPad or laptop. You can get a phone with 512gb of storage. Samsung offers phones with a terabyte of storage.

[pittendrigh]

You get to make a choice. You can ignore the embedded multi-media links.

Birding is a burgeoning outdoor sport. Fishing and hunting are in demographic decline but birding is exploding. Many birders are competitive. They make lists and feel triumphant if they see more birds today than you did (I don't react to birding that way but many do).

You don't have to see a bird to have it count on your daily list. Birding works on an honor system. If you heard a Pileated Woodpecker but didn't see it you still get to put it on your list. All birders accept this.

At birding conferences there are ALWAYS lectures on how to identify birds by sound (by their songs). Bird sound books are popular. Bird song books are the first category I can think of that are all switching over to electronic only. A paperback could come with a packaged DVD. Publishers tried that 20 years ago. It's expensive and nobody likes it.

Bird song books are starting to be made (like What the Robin Knows) with embedded audio. People like it. That's what they are buying. Short audio clips are small and can be embedded in the ebub, as you download it. Even so their support is spotty. What the Robin Knows plays audio on the Google version but not the Kindle version. All that will change. No multi-media ebooks will be like 8-track tapes soon.

Audio combined with video (required for technical how-to-do-it genres) is too big to store on a phone. Google, Kindle, Mobi or whatever don't support streaming well. If at all. But it's coming. Whether you like it or not.

In the meantime I do it with HTML and server-side scripting. My customers love it. Try teaching someone how to build a boat with words only. You cannot. You can make a passable stab at it by including still images (jpegs). But the combination of video AND WORDS blows that out of the water.