I presented at Digital Book World 2011 about using EPUB3 to produce multimedia and interactive ebooks that will be compatible with multiple devices and software ereaders.
Anyone who’s ever been to a digital publishing conference knows that there is always a bewildering array of products that create and display enhanced content: ebooks that contain video, audio, [...]
iBooks now supports an extension to EPUB that allows publishers to create books with precise layout using CSS. This is Apple’s own extension, not part of the EPUB specification itself (and not one that they suggested be included in EPUB3).
The goal of this post is to simply document the extension and show how to create [...]
We were happy to once again be able to work on this series of web design books. I highly recommend both CSS3 for Web Designers and HTML5 for Web Designers. They’re a great resource for ebook developers who want to get up to speed on some of the tags and styling that will be available [...]
This was my first year at TOC Frankfurt and the Frankfurt Book Fair, and I had a fantastic, sleep-challenged time. O’Reilly Media was kind enough to invite me to speak at TOC about the current work on EPUB3 as it relates to HTML5 and other technologies.
Slides from EPUB Evolutions are posted but it may be [...]
[Update: Liz Castro has an even easier post on editing EPUB files directly on the iPad.]
The arrival of iBooks this year helped many people understand that ebooks were already capable of interesting experimentation, multimedia, and nuanced, thoughtful design. Many of iBooks’ strengths come directly from the fact that they wisely chose to base it on [...]
Note: As of iBooks 1.1.2 (December 2010) this example no longer works, though JavaScript is still supported. I’m hoping to post an updated example soon.
iBooks supports JavaScript-based interactivity in EPUB content.
I took some content from Cooking with Booze by James Bridle (a.k.a. George Harvey Bone). It’s released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share [...]
I re-recorded my talk at IDPF Digital Book as a video. Getting the audio synced properly was no fun so I apologize for a few production issues.
Interactivity in EPUB
View more videos from lizadaly.
Here’s the executive summary of the talk:
You can add interactivity to an EPUB book using either the <object> or <script> elements.
[...]
The launch of the iPad and iBooks and the tremendous stream of one-off demos reimagining publishing have made it extremely difficult to understand what technologies for enriched content are available to publishers today. In particular, I’ve seen a lot of confusion about what HTML5 might actually mean and what specific opportunities it might bring for [...]
ePubs are being created with increasingly sophisticated designs and ebook devices are becoming increasingly powerful. This creates a real tension: ePub creators want to be able to develop nuanced ebook designs using CSS, the makers of ePub reading systems face an expanding range of screen sizes (from postage stamp to poster size), and some readers [...]
Of all the problems I needed to solve to develop the mobile version of Ibis Reader, I didn’t think I’d need to solve pagination. “WebKit supports CSS3 columns, I don’t have to worry about it.”
My idea was that I’d make the viewport as wide as a single column but force at least 2 columns, and [...]