Read Aloud icon on Ibooks is missing

[oston]

I have two ebooks enabled for read-aloud, using .smil files and mp3 audio.

Both books work as expected on Thorium and Colibrio Vanilla Readers and both pass the epub check in Sigil.

But when loaded into Ibooks on my Ipad, one of the books shows the read-aloud speaker icon in a black bar at the top of the window, and the read-aloud works perfectly. But the second book does not show the read-aloud speaker icon.

I used the first book as the basis of enabling read-aloud on the second book.

I have checked both ebooks in Sigil and cannot see any missing items that might cause Ibooks not to recognize the 2nd book as read-aloud enabled.

Does anyone, with experience with read-aloud books in Ibooks, have any suggestions where to look for what might be missing in the 2nd book

[KevinH]

Happy to test the broken one on my ipad in iBooks and report back. It is probably something in the opf. Instead of the whole book, just cut it down to an intro paragraph of two (just enough to test with) and post it if you want my testing.

Or alternatively privately post the full epub someplace and pm a link to "KevinH" (me) here on Mobileread.

[oston]

MANY thanks, Kevin. I will prepare a short version and post it here later this evening, or tomorrow.

[oston]

Hi Kevin.
Here is a short test epub (attached) with the same issue as the full file.

I made a mistake with the audio sync. The last paragraph is not tagged to the right audio clip. But that does not matter from the diagnostic point of view.

The read-aloud speaker icon does not show up in Ibooks, but the file plays with no problems on Thorium and Collibrio.

Very many thanks for the help.

Jim

[KevinH]

Okay, I could not get iBooks (Books.app) to read aloud your test case epub on either my Mac Desktop or my ipad. So I tried with the official mobi-dick idpf sample epub with media-overlays and it would not work at all either in iBooks.app (Books.app).

I then tried your test case in Thorium on my mac Desktop and both it and the mobi-dick with media overlays performed perfectly.

On my iPad I normally use the BlueFire Reader app for epub3 and it worked flawlessly with your test case and with the moby dick official overlay sample epub.

So I started snooping about how iBooks treats the Read-Along feature. And found this (note the highlighted part of the quote below):

https://help.apple.com/itc/booksasse...oj/static.html

Read Aloud Books
Overview
In Read Aloud books, an audio file using a narrator’s voice can read the text on a page and the words can be highlighted as they are spoken. The reader can choose to have the pages turn automatically to keep the session flowing, or set them to turn manually. A tap on the screen displays controls in the upper-right corner of the book to customize the reading and listening experience. Note that read aloud content is supported only in Fixed Layout Books. Apple Books syncs text and audio using Media Overlays, an EPUB-specific subset of Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). This section provides information about Media Overlays, SMIL files, and tips for using Media Overlays to create Apple Books read aloud content.

So is the epub book that you have that works on ipad iBooks any chance a Fixed Layout epub? According to that quote above, only Fixed Layout epub3 will use that feature in Apple's iBook.app.

Neither the IDPF official media overlays Moby Dick nor your test epub is a fixed format epub3. They are both reflowable format (which is the only format Sigil supports).

So I do not think you are doing anything wrong. Fixed Format epub3's really only make sense for interactive children's books because PDF's are a much better alternative for any other types of fixed layout reading.

[KevinH]

FWIW, I loaded your test epub into Sigil and ran our Readium Reader plugin (see our Plugin Index thread) and even it nicely worked just fine with your test case doing read aloud.

So Read Aloud is supported for reflowable epubs and works. It is just iBooks that has this strange limitation. Unfortunately neither the BibiReader Plugin nor the EpubJS Plugin support media overlays, but the Readium plugin workd just fine.

Note the BlueFire Reader is a one of the best overall epub readers for the iPad and it is free for people to download and use the reader app. I highly recommend it over anything iBooks related due iBooks not properly following the epub3 spec in many places.

[oston]

Many thanks for that sleuthing, Kevin.

Yes, Fixed-Layout was the difference between the two books,
I found this in the demo book:
<meta property="rendition:layout">pre-paginated</meta>

It's very disapointing that this does not work for reflowables in Ibooks. But as you say it does work fine with the BlueFire Reader which I had not heard of before, but installed it just now.

Thanks again,
Jim

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by oston

Many thanks for that sleuthing, Kevin.

Yes, Fixed-Layout was the difference between the two books,
I found this in the demo book:
<meta property="rendition:layout">pre-paginated</meta>

It's very disapointing that this does not work for reflowables in Ibooks. But as you say it does work fine with the BlueFire Reader which I had not heard of before, but installed it just now.

Thanks again,
Jim

Sorry, I just this minute saw this thread. That's me, 3 days late to my own funeral. Anyway:

Read-aloud in iBooks has not been supported for reflowable, ever. Kevin's sleuthing is 99.9999% the cause.

Hitch