XWD as an enhanced ebook authoring system

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

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. :)

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!

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

What I found when we were developing our three iPad apps is Apple is very hostile to Windows users.

Even though I created the apps in Windows, we could only submit the app to the iTunes store on a Mac. And the process of submitting the app files was so convoluted that Gene, my stereogram partner who works on a Mac threw up his hands and said, no way. So we had to hire an expert to shepherd our apps through the process.

I was writing a review of Adobe's app creation process for Communication Arts Magazine which is the bible of the professional arts industry, and I asked my media contact at Apple why I could not submit my files via Windows and why the process was so user unfriendly.

Her response after I asked the same question repeatedly and was put off, was they had sold X millions of iPads and have x hundreds of millions of downloads. Translation, go pound sand. Or get a Mac and get real.

What I liked about an app vs an epub was epub was only supported in portrait mode and our images are primarily landscape and the apps let up use both orientations differently. The landscape mode is for the full size stereograms and the portrait mode shows the grayscale reveal image, the title and authors copyright.

So, if Xara made a product for creating mobile apps that were WYSIWYG and in the hundred dollar price range, they could pretty own that field. Especially on Windows. An Android app builder would be killer!

Gary - I totally agree with you.

I'm a Windows guy for desktop and laptop, and an Android guy for phone and tablet.

I will not allow the "contagion" that is iTunes on my machines :-)

My daughter's MacBook Pro is running Snow Leopard, and I have to upgrade it to Lion to use the iBook Author package. I have to say at $30 it's not a bad price to do the upgrade. I'll probably do it tomorrow as my ISP meters by bandwidth after 16:00, and the upgrqade is likely to be fairly big.



It's now even clearer to me that if anyone from Xara is reading this thread they could "own" the non-Apple market if they were clever.

One thing I would point out with the iBook Author package. They allow KeyNote presentations to be embedded in the book. As far as I'm concerned that means I can create some really nice interactive, animated diagrams in the publication without having to learn something like Adobe Edge.

I can't imagine that Xara could "embed" a Powerpoint presentation with animations into an EPUB (gosh it would be wonderful if they could). They'd probably have to use Flash for animated diagrams, and that means a lot of conversion work plus the cliff face of a learning curve for Flash authoring.


The EULA for the iBook Author is pretty interesting too. If I decide to charge money for my iBook, I have to sell it through iTunes. I cannot distribute it any other way.

As an author, I still own the content. But since the content is rich media arranged by the iBook Author, I wonder what that really means.

Bottom line...iBook Author exists today and it looks pretty good. BUT...I definitely think there's a huge market opportunity for Xara with the non-Apple demographic.

Cheers,
SPuD

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by gwpriester

An Android app builder would be killer!

---

Have a look at Android Apps Maker ► http://www.android3apps.com/
Their Ebook maker is ► http://www.android3apps.com/ebook-android-apps/

Another ebook maker ► http://www.androidzoom.com/android_a...ker_bbwxs.html

Hi sledger,
Thanks for these, but the first link didn't work for me. Maybe I was supposed to look at it on a phone?

The second one did.

Personally I would not want to use Android as a development environment for ebooks. I'd want to use a PC and then output an Android-friendly EPUB.

That's just my 2 cents :-)

Cheers,
SPuD

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by spudmachine

Hi sledger,
...the first link didn't work for me. Maybe I was supposed to look at it on a phone?

---

Nope, works fine for me in Google Chrome, IE9 and FF 11.0 in Windows 7 Pro

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by spudmachine

Personally I would not want to use Android as a development environment for ebooks. I'd want to use a PC and then output an Android-friendly EPUB.

---

OK cool, but my post was quoting Gary who does ;)

Hi sledger,
Maybe the link did work - it's just that the site looked a bit "odd" (that's probably me being suspicious, I used to work for a content security company).

Maybe Gary can clarify, but I interpreted his comment, here "An Android app builder would be killer!" as meaning something like,

"Using XWD as a computer-based (ie. desktop or laptop running Windows, Linux or OSX) development environment for Andoid apps would be a killer".

A lot of Android apps are actually developed on another platform and are then "compiled" (or equivalent) for the phone or tablet.

I would totally agree with you that developing small apps directly on an Android device is possible.

Cheers,
SPuD

You're getting confused. Neither Gary nor I suggested building Androids apps on an Android device.
Neither are the links I offered for his no obligation perusal.

Right now, using Xara Designer to create the graphics for android apps is already being done, it is in fact ideal.
I can't see XWD being turned into a Java development tool.

Isn't the thing that makes Xara great as a design package (WYSIWYG), also the thing that makes it weak as an eBook system?

Ebooks need to adapt their layout according to form factor, but Xara has always worked with fixed layouts. If we want fixed layouts, then PDF is fine.

Gary - I understand the frustration that is Apple's app submission programme, the tortuous route to app submission combined with the need to pay Apple a licence fee and have access to or own a Mac.

I too have been frustrated by that, but I do understand what a genious thing it is for Apple. It has allowed them to boost their bottom line and bring back software development to the Mac.

-Apple gets a yearly licence fee from all Apple developers.
-Apple sells Macs to those developers
-Apple encourages developers to use their tools and development language
-Apple is set to reinvigorate Mac software development by bringing the same skills learnt by "iDevelopers" into play on a Mac AppStore.

Not great for cross-platform windows developers, but an inspired stance by Apple who managed to leverage their hardware advantage into a software advantage when Mac had gone way down as a software development platform.

They did a great job for the company.

Hi Pauland,

To your point...

Isn't the thing that makes Xara great as a design package (WYSIWYG), also the thing that makes it weak as an eBook system?

Ebooks need to adapt their layout according to form factor, but Xara has always worked with fixed layouts. If we want fixed layouts, then PDF is fine.


You're right - the first generation of ebooks were variable layout (text reflowing). But there is now a fixed layout EPUB "standard", and more specifically is that the enhanced ebooks (ie. with video, animated figures, quizzes etc.) that Apple is selling are all fixed layout.

It's exactly because XWD has great WYSIWYG capability that I thought it might be a good fixed-layout, enhanced ebook development package.

BTW - I'm not arguing against PDF. I guess I'm saying that I need a good development environment for enhanced ebooks. If the output is PDF and it looks as good as the iBooks then I'll be happy.

However, if Xara did become interested in adapting XWD to this role, then I suspect EPUB would be an easier output option for them. From what I understand of EPUB it's basically HTML in a ZIP file.


Cheers,
SPuD

Hi sledger,
Sorry if I'm confused :)

I'll admit that you can think of an enhanced ebook as a form of tablet app.

But looking at what the iBook Author system does, that's pretty much what I would be looking for in any enhanced ebook development system.

The downside is that it only runs on an iPad (which I do not own).

Pauland mentioned the same thing - Apple is really clever at getting people like me, who actively avoid their products, to even contemplate going to the Dark Side.

I have to say the authoring envionment seems to be incredibly compelling.

But just think - if XWD could do something similar for cross-platform it would be a real killer application.

Cheers,
SPuD

Just in case Xara folks are interested in the business case.

Check out this story of a Russian billionaire using proprietry tablets in Russian schools.

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/arch...uptor?page=all

It looks like one of the big uses of the enhanced ebook is as a textbook. In the US there will be high school teachers creating their own iBooks because the software is breathtakingly easy to use.

But this Russian guy is using a "proprietary tablet". I suspect he'll be using a version of Android on it, but if it can run an enhanced EPUB reader then Xara could sell thousands of copies of XWD into Russia for content development.

Schools and universities all around the world are going to want to develop these enhanced ebooks. This is why Apple made the software free of charge - they know they'll recoup that investment many times over.

Anyway - OSX Lion almost finished installing on my daughter's MacBook Pro. I should be able to try the iBook Author out soon :)

Cheers,
SPuD

All I am saying is if Xara created a Xara style product for creating Android apps it would be pretty terrific (killer).

Steve - You are an endless resource. I'll check that out.

Don't thank me, thank Google for having the patience to put up with my insistent querying :D

I too wish for an epub export function as I am also using Xara to do a graphic novel.