XWD as an enhanced ebook authoring system

[spudmachine]

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

[gwpriester]

I moved your post to the Dear Xara Forum, SPuD.

I agree this would be a great feature.

I did an e-pub book in Adobe InDesign and three iPad apps using InDesign and the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite because that was the only product available that could handle the task. And this capability is going to be more and more in demand as people want more mobile based content. So, who knows. Cross your fingers and hope that someone at Xara is listening.

[angelize]

I think this would be a very interesting feature for Xara to have. I have actually thought about trying my hand at an e-publication, and if I could do something like this in Xara would be a great plus!

[spudmachine]

Thanks for the sanity check, Gary and Angelize.

The enhanced e-book world seems to be moving towards EPUB, which is an open standard.

Whle I would never claim to be an expert, EPUB looks like it's HTML (and other stuff) inside a ZIP container. If you think about it, an enhanced e-book has to be delivered as one file - not as a bunch of HTML and media files. So an EPUB file is basically a website inside a ZIP container.

OK, I may be simplifying the situation but that implies to me that XWD is already on the point of being an enhanced e-book creation system. I would imagine there are three things it needs:

• Templates to make sure the fixed-page size EPUBs are created correctly.
• Some kind of EPUB verification tool to make sure that the author has not used features that fall outside the scope of the standard. (Note - I'm guessing the opensource community will come up with something like this soon).
• A utility to package the resulting "web site" into an EPUB file for publication. By keeping this as a separate utility you get the option to use opensource without having to pubish any of your own code.

I'm sure I've over-simplified the matter, but if Xara folks are listening this looks like a relatively modest development project that would open up an entirely new market for your existing product.

By the way - I've been positioning this as an enhanced e-book development environment. The regular e-book fixed page size EPUB format also requires a WYSIWYG editor - like XWD. (Note, these are e-books with fixed, none-reflowing text, but without embedded multimedia features like animation or video).

So let's see...

• Adobe InDesign CS5.5, yours for the low, low price of...$657.88 (according to Amazon).
  
  
• If XWD had this feature you could pitch the entry level XWD at $49.99 that would handle fixed page EPUB without multimedia features (ie. no embedded animation or video).
• XWD Premium is the enhanced e-book platform that would handle multimedia for $99.99.

AND...you pitch a great set of templates and an ease of use message vs InDesign.

You also position Xara Designer Pro as the way to design your own e-book templates.

Cheers,
SPuD

[StevenWWinters]

I thought that eBooks generally used free flowing text to accommodate any screen size/pixel ratio? And if fixed width, what is the advantage over .PDF?

[gwpriester]

I think you're correct Steven

On the iPad, I can make the text larger or smaller and it reflows to the size. I'm sure it's the same with the Kindle and Nook.

[Albacore]

Gee I am no expert on this subject but have to do for some publications that I produce in ID. I have to produce both portrait and landscape docs. and these have to be linked together so that it does not matter which way the document is viewed. Also when I place the text to one doc it is placed in the other and this is done through InFlow via a special way of saving that doc. Most of the interactions are done through the panels which write specific scripts for you which will run when you export as SWF file and ID is fine tuned to run on iOS system which misses lots of people who use the older versions of the Android system. I had a long learning curve to get my publications to run correctly using ID and I doubt that Xara has the Muscle to produce such a script driven publication although buttons and hyperlinks are done in a similar way using layers and page options. It would be better for Xara to concentrate on the export filter for swf. files instead of just using placeholders for the file and exporting as html. It is a big ask! to get a Xara to produce a programme which will include nested overlays, pinch & zoom with buttons which have many actions and will work when a video is running. I think it would be better to wait for a developer who comes up with a PDF converter to do the job.

[spudmachine]

Folks,
Yes, you're correct. The current EPUB standard was devloped for reflowing text.

According to this article Apple has developed an extension to EPUB for fixed layout.

Looks like Apple is no hurry to add this to the EPUB standard, but you can imagine that if you go to all the trouble of designing a nice looking page, the last thing you want is for the text to reflow and ruin the effect.


For those of you interested, Lynda.com has a tutorial on how to create fixed layout ebooks in InDesign.

Cheers,
SPuD

[spudmachine]

Hi Steven,
Sorry - you had a second part to your question. PDF vs EPUB.

I'm not sure how PDF handles rich media. I know one can embed Flash and video into PDF, but I don't know if those rich media elements are in the PDF file itself, or are separate.

If they are separate elements in PDF, then the advantage of EPUB is that the book itself, the video, audio and any animation files are all included in the "ZIP file".

But that's just my guess.

Cheers,
SPuD

[spudmachine]

Oops. I think I just answered my own question.

When I was Googling to answer Steven on the difference between EPUB and PDF I found that Apple has released a free ebook authoring package called iBook Author.

Superficially it looks totally awsome - but then again I thought the same about Keynote until I tried to use it :-) I'm back to Powerpoint now.

However, it does appear that iBook Author gives me everything I need to produce enhanced ebooks on a Mac. I notice that one can even insert a Keynote file into the e-book. So that takes care of how one would create simple interactive animations.

The downside is that the only thing that can play these enhanced ebooks right now is an iPad - and I'm an Android person. Hopefully we'll see an iBook-capable reader on Android soon.

Hmmm. I'm wishing now that I hadn't given away my MacBook Pro to my daughter last year! I can feel a Hackintosh moment coming on!

Cheers,
SPuD

PS. If you need inspiration, check out the interactive text books that Apple is marketing.