Here’s the executive summary of the talk:

• You can add interactivity to an EPUB book using either the <object> or <script> elements.
• Currently object has the best support, especially using Flash in Adobe Digital Editions.
• The script element is specifically discouraged (though not disallowed) in EPUB 2.0.1, and no major reading system supports it. However, all browsers do!
• The primary advantage of interactivity using script is that the content creator has the ability to manipulate every part of the ebook: all of the text, its layout, even potentially the user interface of the reading system itself. With object you can apply interactivity to just an arbitrary rectangle.
• There is a great deal of interesting animation and even interactivity possible using CSS3, which is allowed in EPUB 2.0.1 and is supported by iBooks and other WebKit-based ereaders.
• Interactivity is also possible using JavaScript combined with the HTML5 canvas element, though canvas is not part of EPUB 2.0.1.
• With access to JavaScript on mobile devices, ebooks can potentially gain access to information about the reading device itself, such as the location of the reader in the physical world, or the device’s orientation, or even add photos and video from the device’s camera.
• Any ereader that allows JavaScript provides the ability for ebooks to access live data on the web.
• The primary blocker for extremely rich interactive ebooks is ereader support, but by embedding browser-based reading systems like Monocle, content creators can distribute such ebooks today.
• It remains to be worked out how to handle JavaScript in larger ereading systems both safely and with proper fallbacks to non-interactive content.

I’ll also be posting some of the example files used in the tutorial in a forthcoming post.

EPUB Enhanced, Interactive & Connected

eBook content authored in the IDPF EPUB standard is not limited to text and images. Publishers and developers are integrating into EPUB titles audio, video, animation, and a growing array of interactive educational content. This session will include updates to the EPUB standard and how readers will interact with eBooks utilized enhancements that take titles far beyond what print could ever offer.

I’ll also be around for the remainder of BEA and would be happy to meet up with people, especially other victims of the London ash-cloud who have been conference-deprived.

In the video you can enjoy the dramatic moment when the lights inexplicably dim and I think I’m being thrown off stage.

(Slides for ‘Designing ebooks for ePub reading engines’)

Update April 19, 2010: Like many others, I was unable to fly to London and will not be attending LBF.

Instead of becoming alarmed at the proliferation of ereaders and ebook softwares, designers and publishers should be thinking about the two dominant ePub reading engines: Adobe Mobile Reading SDK and WebKit.

This talk will help ebook producers understand what a reading engine is and how this framework can greatly simplify ebook crafting, design and testing.

Thanks to the folks at BookNet for providing me with the opportunity to speak and spend some quality time with some of my favorite Canadians.

For my TOC Ignite presentation on Ibis Reader, I used many now-obligatory photos found by searching Creative-Commons-licensed content on the Flickr advanced search page. This is an invaluable resource and I wish more people would consider broadly licensing their images.

Then I shot some photos specifically for the talk. It’s hard to graphically represent an “ebook” so I struggled with this until I remembered this journal I’d bought in college. I had to make sure the picture didn’t reveal any of the post-adolescent angst inside:

I also wanted one to illustrate my idea of a digital book not having a back cover, meaning its pages could spill out on to the net rather than being bound together. It took more than an hour to shoot and composite these photos together, by tearing up an old advance reading copy (sorry!) and shaking the pages out while the camera auto-fired. (This was an excellent way to procrastinate.)

But my favorite trick for slide-making that’s actually pretty lazy is to use the all-powerful Firebug. Firebug is a plugin for Firefox that’s meant to aid web developers in designing and QAing websites. One of its features is that it allows you to change the HTML or CSS of any page in real time. Take this fake Twitter screenshot, which I was happy to see featured in a Jane Austen blog:

I actually went to twitter.com and used Firebug to edit and delete elements on the page until I had what I wanted. The screenshot never went into Photoshop. For example:

@siracusa would never actually say that to me, but I can make him say whatever I want now. HA ha.

The other nice thing is that you can delete elements off the page and remove distractions. So in the Twitter image above I removed all the site navigation and anything that wasn’t part of the punchline — especially important in a slide that’s only going to be on-screen for 15 seconds.

You can do the same trick in recent WebKit browsers that have the debugger enabled, though Firebug is still more powerful.

(All photos above are licensed CC Attribution.)

I had a great time speaking in front of the audience at Digital Book World 2010. Actually, that’s not true, it was pretty scary — big audience! But the talk seemed well-received, and the conference was very well-organized, especially given that this was its first year.

You can follow the slides and notes on the Digital Book World page for the talk (sorry about my giant head). The slides are also embedded below.

Digital Book World

January 27, 2010

When digital books account for 10% or more of revenue, indifferent third-party conversions aren’t enough. I’ll be presenting a plenary session on taking ebook quality control to the next level.

O’Reilly Tools of Change

February 22-24, 2010

Networked, Mobile & Landlocked: Current Ereaders

Keith Fahlgren and I will reprise our session from last year showcasing various ereading devices. We’ll focus on new devices released this year, including the Kindle DX, Nook and 3G Sony Reader, and describe the current and future impact of Android on mobile reading.

Open Publication Distribution System

Hadrien Gardeur (Feedbooks), Keith Fahlgren (O’Reilly Media, Inc. ), Liza Daly (Threepress Consulting Inc.)

You may have heard about OPDS and BookServer. This technical workshop will describe the OPDS format, its role in the larger BookServer architecture, and how to create and distribute OPDS book catalogs.

Reading and Purchase on the Open Mobile Web: Introducing Ibis Reader

This will be a pecha kucha/O’Reilly Ignite. I’ve never presented one before, so that should be, uh, fun?

BookNet Canada Tech Forum

March 25, 2010

This presentation will focus on the formatting options available in ePub, how open standards like CSS are implemented in the real world, and identify those features of ebooks which can be controlled — and those that are just part of the new publishing reality.

The theme of my talk was that ePub is easy to produce using the same skillsets that some publishers already have in-house in their IT and web departments (though there were plenty of heads shaking that they don’t have even those). There was a lot of interest in being able to use InDesign since that is a tool that a few publishers do have.

Slides follow:

Introduction to E-formats

Kindles, iPhones, Sony Readers, Google Books, e-pub, prc, DRM, no-DRM, images with OCR, page-based display vs. reflowed text . . . How do we put books in front of readers on the web? How can we get files ready for a variety of handheld devices? What will it take to get your titles into every online bookstore? Conversion experts will outline the array of e-book formats available to online readers and discuss what e-books look like, what e-books can and can’t do, and how you can prepare today’s scholarly books for tomorrow’s containers.

Moderator: Kate Davey, BiblioVault Manager, University of Chicago Press
Panelists: Liza Daly, President, Threepress Consulting Inc.; Daniel Lee, Director of Digital Content Development, Harvard University Press; Chris Palma, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Book Search

The session is at 5-6pm on Saturday, which means all the attendees will already be at the hotel bar. For the few who show up, I’ll be covering ePub, conversion from other formats, reflow and accessibility.