video in epub

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by theducks

Mom or Dad is supposed to supply the Audio Visual effects while reading a book to smalls.

Agree, that's the fun part to reading to my children. Supply the funny voices, sound and movement effects and so on.

However, I do see a market for it when we look at childrens books. I also know that this was a 'logical' movement. Could they only please do the following things *as well*
1. provide stronger wording in the format description instead of 'should' and alike
2. fix the formatting issues we have now (should be solved by point 1...)
3. Bloody agree on the specifications and stick by it.

When not possible, please make it a derivative/fork of the specifications and call it different.

It the near future we are almost obliged to create at lease the following formats:
1. ePUB (ADE)
2. ePUB (Nook)
3. ePUB (iBooks)
4. mobi

And I wouldn't be surprised that if/when Amazon/Kindle supports ePUB in the future that there would be an additional on. Probably they will have their own flavour...

[Nori]

Originally Posted by theducks

Mom or Dad is supposed to supply the Audio Visual effects while reading a book to smalls.

That's one.
Also many how-to books can improve their qualities with audio & visual effects.

[Univ-educator]

A lot of commentators have expressed horror at the thought of having video elements in ePub dcuments. "Keep video out of my books!" they say. As a postgraduate medical educator I have a great need to produce in-house text teaching materials that can be carried in a 7 inch eReader "off WiFi line" and that includes integrated video clips. Sure, keep your old Kindle next to your bed for night reading of novels (without video). I love my old beside Kindle too.
The color eReader with video is the FUTURE EDUCATIONAL BOOK of educators. The wonderful thing will be one can edit the base documents on your office computer and just pull in the class eReaders to upload the updated material every few months.
At the moments my illustrated PDFs read great on the color eReaders, but I need to figure out how to get my accompanying video clips integrated into the documents in some format or some way.

[Freeshadow]

I think ereader are computing-power-sided still to weak for that
I remember a discussion with sb searching for a linux capable laptop for studying purposes (organic chemistry) he explicitely needed 3d graphic support - (so chose nvidia) for display and analysis of chemical structures.

[hernep]

I am not so much worried they add JavaScript and videos to ePubs. What I am worried is that my download time will be longer. With 3G or WiFi ereaders, it does have huge difference whether size is 500kB or +100MB.
JavaScript support could be useful for navigating or for notes. It could be useful for school books or similar self-teaching books. JavaScript can have other possibilities, too. But not on standard eInk device which started the whole ebook frenzy. Will current eInk devices support ePub3 through firmware updates, I guess not.
I have take closer look on what ePub3 has to offer, other than bells and whistles. Inserting video seems to be easy at least. Standard HTML5.

[Aleyst]

To the OP,
http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/.

She has a few books about formatting epub's for Apple Devices, and a little mini booklet about audio and video in epub.

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by hernep

I have take closer look on what ePub3 has to offer, other than bells and whistles.

I'd be really astonished IF you find something. (and bet I won't be the only one) Instead of focusing development on well-known troubles on the text-based content side (look in the epub-forum what all requires tweaks to look somehow reasonable and halfway Clean according to typeseting standards) They scraped all bells&whistles together they could find, glued 'em to the format and sprayed "epub3" on the outcome.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

I'd be really astonished IF you find something. (and bet I won't be the only one) Instead of focusing development on well-known troubles on the text-based content side (look in the epub-forum what all requires tweaks to look somehow reasonable and halfway Clean according to typeseting standards) They scraped all bells&whistles together they could find, glued 'em to the format and sprayed "epub3" on the outcome.

Y'know, the sad part is, it doesn't matter. It does not matter one whit what we think, say or do. I have to slog through this crap every day; authors who want every Magpie thing in the whole world in their books, but can't even manage to send me the basic information I need (metadata) for embedding to meet the minimum ePUB standards, so I have to scrounge for it from copyright pages, etc. I've lost track of the number of books that Apple's sent back for the most ludicrous things (not simply to us, mind you); I've had clients who have come to me (for ePUB clean-up of someone else's books) because their books were accepted at Apple but rejected at Overdrive for mystery reasons.

If there's a retailer out there actually using ePUBcheck as something other than an excuse, I'm damned if I know which one it is. Every single day, it's "embed audio" (of some non-professional person reading an excerpt from the work in which it's being embedded--I mean, think about that; not an excerpt from a DIFFERENT or future book--it's the book someone has already bought) or "embed video" (of homemade videos) or "make the ship sail across the sea" (gee, thanks, Threepress), or...oh, my new favorite, make a robot-voice MP3 that magically sounds like Robin Sachs, or...the retailers do NOT care, and the ammy authors only want whatever is going to make them the next John Locke (put the Other books page at the front! Put it at the back! Put it in the middle of the book with a Pink Teddy Bear gift certificate!)...I mean, it's endless.

If I had a wishlist, it would be ONE damn standard that we could all use and, more importantly, rely upon. Do I care if it's html5 and css3? Or ePUB3? No. I just wish it wasn't 20 different moving goalposts for 20 different retailers, particularly when (for those of us making books commercially) most authors won't sell any books on 17 or 18 of those platforms. And it's not just Apple I'm bitching about; Nook is just as bad, and I shudder to think about what will show up in its new incarnation.

Not to mention what happens when they do change something, and suddenly 100 ebooks abruptly look like hell (like the infamous Nook hyphenation issue). It's hard enough trying to explain the very basics ("there are no pages," and "you can't use a sidebar in a K1-K2- or K-3") without trying to explain why everything is different from platform to platform, and how it's not realistic to expect any ebook company to make 5 versions of one book as 5 different ePUBs just to satisfy Nook's RMSDK versus Apple's idiotic centering issue versus Sony's equally idiotic Pre-900 series justification issues...ARRRGGGGHHHHH!

I seriously wish that, glitzy as it is, Apple would have kept ebooks and apps SEPARATE, and kept ebooks as text-delivery devices and apps as whiz-bang "ooooh-aahhhh" mini-website delivery devices. But that ship has sailed (no Threepress pun intended), and those of us in the Biz or dedicated dilettanti are stuck with it.

Sorry...just blowing off some steam. Bad day at Black Rock here at Booknook, where apparently rude clients were the Troop du Jour.

</rant>

Hitch

[SusanM]

Thanks for adding this!

[Hitch]

You're most welcome. And welcome to the fold!

Hitch

[SusanM]

Just finding my way around Mobile Reads so not sure if posts in the right place. Thanks for the welcome, Hitch. I printed out your one platform manifesto for my partner who doesn't seem to understand the challenges of eBooks.

[Hitch]

Susan:

Seriously, welcome aboard. MR is a great place, and the forum-police are really very good about not going whacky with "post's in the wrong place" stuff.

I think in normal circles, they call that post a rant, but you are most welcome to it. If anything, the disparity is greater now than when I wrote it, which feels like an eon ago (a millenium in eBook years). Apple has new cover standards (not less than 1400px on the short side!), which Smashwords has, of course, adopted instantly, so as to keep their "premium" catalog program alive; Amazon has taken up embedding the product image as the book's cover, no matter what the designer does (heaven save us all from clients that don't like the way their cover looks on Amazon's website!), to save their DIY'ers from having to figure out how to DIY, and...

Nook hasn't done anything to make my head do the exorcist dance in at least 90 days, as long as you don't count the stunts they've pulled with the NookKids' deal-io. (i.e.: You can't publish a NookKids' book, fixed-format, with embedded audio/read-along, unless you are an approved NookKids' publisher. You can't be an approved NookKids' publisher unless they approve you, obviously. However, you can't be approved as a NookKids' publisher until you show them samples of your NookKid's books. BUT, you can't HAVE the NookKids' software [hint: it's iAuthor with a different name] for making a NookKids' book--required--unless you're an approved NookKids' publisher.) Get all that? If you think I meant that you can't get the software to make the books that you need to make to get approved UNTIL you get approved--yes, that's what I said. I was lucky--I got the software from someone ELSE, and just made the damn books and pushed my way in. And if you don't have a Mac? Oh, well...you're just outta luck.

Oh, and let's not forget LULU, who is still using ePUBcheck 1.x -something, so if you make books with embedded fonts for Apple, it'll fail at Lulu, unless you screw around with the OPF. {sigh}.

The Crazy is loose in the eBook world, and I don't think it's getting ANY better, I truly don't. I love the innovation, but I hate the stupid. If you make truly super books, the disparity will bite you in the ass; the alternative is to make vanilla books, that will work on all devices, but won't shine. It's frustrating, and I know that most serious hobbyists and pro's here would agree.

/rant

Hitch

[Freeshadow]

That's a posting which could be answered without text:

Hucking Fell!
What you report sounds like collective fail in sanity rolls with really screwed up dice.
Sorry for you Hitch and all the rest of the makers. Really.
Just a wild guess: Things that matter (you know what I mean: all the typographical twerks) still as crappy as they were?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

That's a posting which could be answered without text:

Hucking Fell!
What you report sounds like collective fail in sanity rolls with really screwed up dice.
Sorry for you Hitch and all the rest of the makers. Really.
Just a wild guess: Things that matter (you know what I mean: all the typographical twerks) still as crappy as they were?

LOL, Freeshadow:

Some things ARE better. Amazon's Fire/K8 formatting has freed up a lot of typography, from simple things like dropcaps to floating images and divs, mostly, being respected. Thus far, they haven't released A/V embeds to the general public, which I am ambivalent about; as a maker, I'd like to have some fun with it, but as someone who sees a lot of bright shiny things passed off as "books," I'm glad that they haven't yet gone the way of Apple, which clearly understands the Human Magpie better than anyone.

The "Immersedition" Dread hasn't caught on yet, as near as I can tell, and for that I am truly grateful. It didn't take Robert Oppenheimer or Stephen Hawking to see that this was the road to embedded product placement, and that made me shudder.

You still have to struggle with smallcaps in many devices. The iBooks app still has funky weirdness with images that are floated inside a div, then floated next to a paragraph, appearing with the concomitant text paragraph at the top of the "page/screen," when rendered--for some reason, text overrides the very upper edge of the image. I don't know yet how to consistently solve it; vertical-align:middle, (granted, unusual), which we'd used for a book with a zillion images that had a similar problem doesn't seem to be working, but I suspect it's something we've overlooked, because the last book with this problem was some months ago--and the app's been updated 6 times since then, and of course when the 3 came out. More importantly--we've observed bizarre behavior in which an image div "moves" 3-4 paragraphs from it's designated location, in iBooks. Now, THAT is funky weirdness. And worse, it's inconsistent funky weirdness, when all our img divs are styled identically, as are the text paragraphs.

ADE still has wacky behavior, but I don't see that changing.

It's hard to focus on design typography when the technology changes so many times from device to device that you're running as fast as you can just to give the client a decent book that works on at least 3-4 major platforms (for most of my clients, it's Nook, iBooks, Kobo, maybe Sony for ePUB and of course MOBI for Amazon).

Amazon has released KindleGen 2.5 which, allegedly, solves the historic issue with indented ul and ol lists, in K7, which I've not tried yet, but devoutly hope is true--THAT would rock.

Reporting live from Bellevue's eBook-maker ward,
Hitch

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Amazon has released KindleGen 2.5 which, allegedly, solves the historic issue with indented ul and ol lists, in K7, which I've not tried yet, but devoutly hope is true--THAT would rock. Hitch

I've always avoided list elements like the plague when ebook building. They always seemed more trouble than they were worth to me. So I'm curious what the historic issue was that you're referring to?