Creating multimedia enhanced ebooks using the EPUB3 standard. Includes a demo of full interactivity in Apple iBooks.

1. Cost-effective
Development of
Enhanced Content
Liza Daly / Threepress
@liza

2. A History of
Enhanced Content
I’m going to start with a history of enhanced content

3. A History of
Enhanced Content
2010 -
which is necessarily a fairly short story since enhanced ebooks have only been in the
marketplace in a significant way in the last year.

4. Introducing the revolutionary
Bookbrary 3000™ Call me Ish
Text
BookBrary
Our story always starts with an exciting new ereader product.

5. Introducing the revolutionary
Bookbrary 3000™ Call me Ish
Text
With magical Smell-o-vision™
Starting at $699
BookBrary
and this product has some new feature which sets it apart from the other ereaders on the
marketplace. Now this tech company has a problem, which is that they don’t have any
content for their cool new device, so they contact you, the publisher.

6. And you say, “Well that sounds great but we’re just learning how to make regular ebooks. We
don’t know how to make ebooks with Smell-o-vision.”

7. And the tech company says, “Oh don’t worry about that. Just send us your content...

8. ...and all the enhanced assets, however you’ve got them, and we’ll care of making the
enhanced ebooks.”

9. Moby 2.0
Exclusively for your
Bookbrary 3000™
Experience classics of
literature as they were
meant to smell. By @melville
Buy Now
$39.99
And they do! And it’s great. And it goes on the marketplace and it’s successful and
everybody’s really excited about this great new kind of enhanced content.

10. Moby 2.0
Exclusively for your
Bookbrary 3000™
Experience classics of
literature as they were
meant to smell. By @melville
Buy Now
$39.99
Absolutely
no refunds!

11. So you the publisher say, “Fantastic! We’ve got a lot of content we want to enhance, can we
send you more of our raw assets just like the first time?”

12. But this time the vendor says, “Oh no, that was just for the pilot. Now we need you to send us
the assets prepared just like we need.” And they send along a 200 page guide to producing
smell-enhanced ebooks.

13. oobk
And just when you’re getting started with that process, another new product comes along.

14. oobk
Call me Ish
oobk
And this one is totally new and different from the old one.

15. oobk
Call me Ish
Now with SmellML™ oobk
And it too supports smell-enhanced ebooks, but it uses its own proprietary technology.

16. And they say, “No we won’t accept assets formatted for the other company, we want them
like this.”

17. So what happened? Even major publishers don’t have the capacity to produce unique kinds of
enhanced content for each new device or software platform. Smaller publishers have it even
tougher, because they don’t get the benefit of the initial free conversion. Is there a cost-
effective solution to this?

18. Don’t hand over assets
Insist on standards
There is, and it’s called standards-based content development. The purpose of formatting
standards is to promote interoperable content that can work on all kinds of devices and
software. This is the only approach that’s scalable.

19. EPUB3
Editors’ Drafts being produced today
Initial support in commercial ereaders
already
Final version in Q3 2011
3
EPUB 2.0 is already known as the leading standard for ebook production, but has primarily
been used with static content. EPUB3 provides more guidelines for producing multimedia and
other kinds of enhanced content, and is already being written. Most of the major decisions
have been made and at this time the outstanding issues are largely details. As a result, some
aspects of EPUB3 are already available in ereaders.

20. Multimedia
Apple:
“Embed videos or audio using standard HTML5 tags”
Amazon:
“To embed a video inside a Kindle book add a standard
HTML5 tag”
B&N:
“The following is an example of the video
embed tag: <video ...>
3
In fact as far as multimedia goes the major retailers are already using the same HTML5
tagging...

21. Multimedia
Format
Audio MP3 or AAC
MPEG-4 / H.264 +
Video
MP4 AAC audio
- EPUB3 spec Jan 22, 2011
...but there’s been fragmentation in exactly which video and audio formats are supported.
The EPUB3 specification simplifies this by requiring support for common media types.
Publishers must insist that they will only produce multimedia in the supported formats.

22. Media Streaming
“Video resources, as referenced from
Content Documents, may be located in the
container or remotely”
- EPUB3 spec Jan 22, 2011
3
Another new option that’s worth considering is streaming audio or video, which was
previously not allowed in EPUB and now is explicitly supported.

23. Media Streaming
Low-cost
Cross-platform
Easily repurposed
3
Streaming has a lot of attractive qualities: hosting streaming media can be very inexpensive,
it’s cross-platform because the streaming companies already know how to send the right
format to each device, and you can embed that media in marketing material or book trailers
or the like.

24. Media Streaming
Low-cost
Cross-platform
Easily repurposed
Requires users to be online
Subject to availability
“Authors should prefer locating audio and video resources in
the container to allow the user access to the entire presentation
regardless of connectivity status.”
- EPUB3 spec Jan 22, 2011
3
There are disadvantages to streaming: obviously the user has to be online, the streaming site
may be down or go out of business, and the EPUB spec says that embedded media should be
preferred. But streaming is a worthwhile low-cost option to consider.

25. Interactivity
EPUB3: “Scripted Content Documents”
JavaScript is the supported language.
3
The most interesting kinds of enhancements are true interactivity, whether it’s quizzes or
popups or animation, and support for that is in EPUB3 as well. If an EPUB3 ereader supports
interactivity, it must support it using the JavaScript programming language.

26. Interactivity
“There are over 1 trillion unique public
URLs on the Internet ... [and about]
30% execute some amount of JavaScript.
...Holy crap that's a lot of JavaScript.”
- Ryan Grove, Yahoo engineer
http://www.quora.com/Is-JavaScript-the-most-popular-programming-language-in-the-world
3
JavaScript is one of the most well-known and popular programming languages ever invented.
That means JavaScript developers are much easier to find than app developers.

27. EPUB3 enhancements
I’m going to show a quick demo here of a real-life case where using standards-based
enhancements paid off.

28. EPUB3 enhancements
This is a demo that I was working on internally for a new product.

29. EPUB3 enhancements
I took three pages from a public domain children’s book from the Internet Archive. I wanted
to try different kinds of enhancements on it. I specifically wanted to see if I could recreate the
Alice for the iPad experience using just EPUB3. While there are no EPUB3 reading systems yet,
Apple recently came out with their fixed-layout option in iBooks which is specifically
designed for books with precise layout and advanced CSS3. I tossed the existing demo into
iBooks, and it just worked.

30. [Video demo]

31. For 2011:
One (EPUB3) file
to rule them all
So this year, keep up with the EPUB3 spec development, and use that as your guideline in
evaluating which enhanced platforms to use and how to produce enhanced content.

32. For 2011:
H.264+AAC for video
MP3 for audio
JavaScript for apps

33. Thanks!
Liza Daly / Threepress
@liza
http://threepress.org