Kindle in Motion

[Notjohn]

There are just a few Kindle in Motion books available yet, and I think all of them are Amazon's own imprints. As a Prime subscriber, I have the seldom-exercised opportunity to get a freebie-of-the-month ($1.99 for everyone else). THE SKY BELOW was one such Kindle First and a Kindle in Motion. So I fetched it and began to read it last night.

I have to say that the graphics on this book are dazzling. I haven't checked it on my PaperWhite (which Susan has stolen from me and now regards as her own) but on the Fire tablet the color just leaps off the screen. (Kindles of course don't show color.) There's the occasional jet-black page with orange text, which if someone described to me I would likely grab for the vomit bucket, but thanks to the designer it does work, though with the obvious result that the black text on white pages that follow look pretty tame. I've seen only one bit of MOTION so far, and that was the author's prospective path up Mt Everest: I saw a graphic of the mountain, then a dotted red line marched up it like an ant on drugs, with his various base camps popping up as he marched. But it was so quick I almost missed it, and dang if I could get it to repeat so I could show it to Susan (as I sometimes do with particularly clever ads on the Fire).

But what impressed me most was the fact that images filled the width of the screen. THAT was great. Not to have that quarter-inch of white space at the margin really dressed up the page. (And once when the image was the summit of Everest with a breathless blue sky above it, filling the entire screen, with the text continuing on it as if it were a regular page.)

It's actually a pretty good book, given that it cost me nothing, so I will keep reading. But do I want my own books to start in motion? No. Nor do I want Jack Reacher nor Bernie Gunther to start springing across the screen...

[jhowell]

There is another thread, started last year, that has some discussion of Kindle in Motion. The first post in that thread links to a Medium post by Jiminy Panoz with detailed description of its features.

I am not a fan of the use of motion in books, but several of the other KIM features would be nice to have in regular books that contain illustrations. Perhaps Amazon will open up the authoring of this content at some point.

Since this thread is in the Kindle Formats subforum, it would be a good place to discuss how KIM actually works. I have picked up some bits and pieces, but a lot is still unclear so some of this is speculation.

All of the KIM books produced so far have been done in-house at Amazon. There is no publicly available description of the format or the tools needed to author KIM. It appears that the input format for authoring is EPUB with proprietary markup created using InDesign. This is fed into some tool which produces the KIM book in KFX format and also a MOBI/KF8 version of the book with (almost) all of the proprietary markup stripped out.

As with all of the new e-book features added by Amazon in the past couple of years, KIM is handed by the KFX renderer. KFX was designed so that new features could be added to it over time and support for KIM was a later addition. The set of KIM features is collectively called Illustrated Layout.

The main concept in KIM is the definition of page backdrops that are anchored to particular text in the book. When that text is shown the backdrop is activated.

These backdrops can contain images, video and solid color. Special markup allows these to be rendered to the edges of the screen and also allows the header (book title) and footer (progress) overlays to be selectively disabled.

Images can have markup describing how much of the image is safe to crop from each edge without losing anything important. This allows images to be rendered on devices with differing aspect ratios without distortion or adding black bars to the sides or top/bottom.

Book text is placed over the backdrop, avoiding specially marked areas (defined as polygons) so that image/video content is not hidden. Text automatically switches to a color that contrasts with the backdrop for readability.

[Notjohn]

The main concept in KIM is the definition of page backdrops that are anchored to particular text in the book. When that text is shown the backdrop is activated.

These backdrops can contain images, video and solid color. Special markup allows these to be rendered to the edges of the screen and also allows the header (book title) and footer (progress) overlays to be selectively disabled.

Thanks for the explication and the new word (backdrop). Those were the pages that dazzled me. I hadn't noticed the missing header & footer, but now that you say it, I recall that they were indeed missing.

Now that the subject comes up again, I realize that I've not gone back to the book and probably won't. That happens rather often with ebooks, compared to the print editions, which are harder to ignore.