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 [...]
[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 [...]
We’re making the geo demo featured in the Interactivity in EPUB talk available for download under the MIT License.
About the demo
In the demo, the geolocation capability of the web browser transmits your latitude/longitude. The code then queries the Geonames database to get an English placename.
After that, the code will continually poll for [...]
The video of my session at BookNet Canada Tech Forum is now posted over on their site (scroll down to 1pm):
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’)
No speaking engagements this time (whew!) but I’ll be at London Book Fair 2010 and would love to meet up with folks who want to talk ebooks.
Update April 19, 2010: Like many others, I was unable to fly to London and will not be attending LBF.
Now that I’ve got the hardware iPad, I was able to do some comprehensive reviews of the iBooks application and its treatment of the ePub format.
As noted earlier by Dave Thomas, when an ePub file is added to iTunes, the file is modified in place to add a file called iTunesMetadata.plist. This is really obnoxious, [...]
One nice feature of the Bookworm source code is that it includes a suite of test ebooks. Books which should not be processable, because they’re severely malformed, are prefaced with invalid- in the title. Other books demonstrate different characteristics. (Not all of the other books are actually valid, but their inconsistencies are minor [...]
During much of the first quarter we needed to turn folks away who were looking for help with ebook conversions and other projects, due to the demands of launching Ibis Reader.
We’re on track now to resume consulting and custom publishing software development alongside Ibis Reader, so please feel free to contact info@threepress.org for:
Ebook [...]
About 15 minutes of minor changes and Ibis Reader is the first ereader on the iPad. App developers have to wait for approval, and even Apple has to to wait for the release of the actual hardware. If you have access to the iPad simulator, you can use it right now.
If you access the [...]