Hello,
I'm an occasional visitor to these forums, so I apologise in advance if this topic has been covered. But the only search result I found for "enhanced ebook" was in an off-topic forum.

I'm suggesting that XWD would be a great development environment for cross-platform enhanced e-books, and wondering what your thoughts might be on that.

For those of you who don't know what enhanced e-books are, here's a stunning example - Al Gore's book "Our Choice".

Two things are needed for an enhanced e-book.

1. A superb development environment.

2. The resulting code has to easily run on any platform (PC, Mac, Linux, iPad, Android). Obviously HTML5 would seem like a great cross-platform opportunity, but I won't pretend to be an expert.


I can tell you that right now there's no obvious enhanced e-book authoring system out there. There's the Sophie project, but that requires a dedicated reader, and the reader is not available on iPad or Android. Also, the founders of Sophie tend to have a track record of abandoning projects when they get bored (so do I, so I'm not criticising them :-) ). Certainly the Wiki looks a bit "neglected".

Adobe inDesign has some functionality in this area, but it's expensive and complex to use. And the output is EPUB only. That means you need to understand what EPUB functionality you're using, and whether it's supported on the end platform.


But I would think that XWD is pretty close to being a WYSIWYG enhanced e-book authoring system. I don't know if it's HTML5, or cross-platform though.

I'll stop writing now and see what you folks think :-)

Cheers,
SPuD