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Ask Slashdot: Composing an e-Book With a Couple of Bells and Whistles 148

Posted by samzenpus from the a-little-help-from-strangers dept.
New submitter Cbhihe writes: I want to edit an e-book, a scientific textbook to be distributed on the Kindle tablet to be exact. The book is written. For that I used LibreOffice.
It comes complete with index, drawings, pictures, formulae and its present look and feel is no different from the majority of scientific text, you might be accustomed to browsing. I need advice for the next step, which consists in making this digital pile of data suitable for an e-book.. with a slight twist. The e-book should allow for:
— picture zoom-in in pop-ups on screen
— allow in-text basic interactivity, e.g. when in a exercise, multiple answers are proposed, each answer when clicked should display "Right" or "Wrong" (for instance).
Can you recommend, if not a commercial package that allows such features right out of the box, then at least and preferably open-source technology needed for me to achieve what I want ? I am willing to get down to moderate programming to use your suggested solution. I am conversant in C, C++ and getting there with Python.
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Ask Slashdot: Composing an e-Book With a Couple of Bells and Whistles More

Ask Slashdot: Composing an e-Book With a Couple of Bells and Whistles

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  • HTML (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 03, 2016 @09:06PM (#51232683)

    Just be HTML+javascript. Then you'll have modern Kindles (assuming they can run web browsers) and the other 99% of the market too!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Just be HTML+javascript. Then you'll have modern Kindles (assuming they can run web browsers) and the other 99% of the market too!

      I think you're off by one here. I think the OP wants an e-book format, of which there are several [ebookarchitects.com], however he does not want to be constrained by the existing formats, which....is not possible.

    • HTML

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by caseih ( 160668 )

          The web browser on Kindles with e-ink screens is really not that great at all. The e-ink screen is too slow for fancier content anyway.

        • You can do so much more with HTML+CSS+JS than with eBooks
          That is nonsense. All e-Books I have are .epub and that is, tam tam: HTML.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by stajp ( 2588149 )

            The problem of EPUB is that HTML5 is supported in EPUB3. EPUB2 suggested _not using_ JavaScript - some EPUB2 readers do support JavaScript, but mostly they don't. EPUB3 leaves the option of supporting JavaScript?!?

            And there lies the problem: Making a self supportive HTML5 (+CSS+JS) page is not that hard. Somebody else suggested that for quizzes and self-learning you need a Moodle server - you don't. Android and IOS browsers support local storage (a few MB, but still storage) in JS. If JS is used than the O

    • Or just don't try to build an interactive ebook in the first place. Link the question to the answer key in the back (hypertext is good) but don't fill in or pop up answers. Let a book be a book.

      This is the major mistake folks make with powerpoint presentations. Animations and fancy crap that get in the way of digesting the material on the slide.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by obsess5 ( 719497 )
        I largely agree with your points except ... My eReader is an old, non-eInk Aluratek Libre that still works to my satisfaction. (The screen is like a monochrome Palm Pilot with smooth page transitions, unlike the eInk readers I looked at when I bought the Libre. The saleswoman at Borders tried to tell me that the seizure-inducing flashing between pages on the eInk readers was a feature intended to give me the experience of turning the page in a real book! I gave her credit for trying!) The Libre can rea

      • Or just don't try to build an interactive ebook in the first place.

        That is truly great advice for someone wanting to build an interactive ebook.

        • Hey, if someone seeks advice on which gun to shoot themselves with, "don't do that it's painful and self-destructive," is pretty solid advice. Certainly better than discussing the relative merits of various firearms.

    • I already published two books on Kindle (well, maybe I am not as successful as Stephen King, but at least I know the limitations).

      The first thing you need to take care is not to use tables. They behave terribly in the different Kindle devices. Better make images (preferably in black and white), and embed them in the book.

      I am not sure today, but the tools provided by Amazon were outdated and they didn't make any effort to update them. It is, in fact, complicated to make them to work correctly. The

  • LaTeX classes are one answer (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The LaTeX class "memoir", plus the equation-typesetting package "amsmath", combined with pop-up packages that include "fancytooltips", "fancy-preview", "cooltooltips", and "pdfcomment", in aggregate provide the requested functionality. The LaTeX/memoir/amsmath learning curve is steep however.

    • That's a blast from the past. A better forgotten one. As soon build your ebook with nroff macros so you can present it as a man page.

  • So... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M ( 4212163 ) on Sunday January 03, 2016 @09:26PM (#51232729)

    You want to publish an e-book but you also want to be able to do things that e-books can't do.

    • Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by BitterOak ( 537666 ) on Sunday January 03, 2016 @10:05PM (#51232845)

      You want to publish an e-book but you also want to be able to do things that e-books can't do.

      That's kind of the point. It will make his e-book new and innovative. That's how progress happens.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        . It will make his e-book new and innovative. That's how progress happens.

        No, that would make a new e-book format new and innovative. Progress in terms of new features happens by updating the application and formats to support new features, not by making a new book that can't be actually expressed in existing formats. You sound like a business type of person trying to sell something that doesn't exist without consulting your technical staff, "Our new e-book will include VR experiences for people with Kindles," "Sir, that is not possible with the ebook format," "But saying it is

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        So you want to make an audio CD that displays images on the player's screen? You want to publish an audio CD but also want to be able to do things an audio CD can't do. Maybe try an mp3 format instead as it supports such meta-data like album covers, for some players

        But the point was to make his CD new and innovative. That is how progress happens. How else would we move forward so that audio CDs can display images on players not meant to display images, until someone makes an audio CD that does?

        • Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)

          by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Monday January 04, 2016 @03:59AM (#51233549)

          There are audio CDs that have image data, but they're not Redbook. Redbook audio is just that: audio.

          • There are audio CDs that have image data, but they're not Redbook. Redbook audio is just that: audio.

            I guess you've never heard of Sub-Code Graphics [wikipedia.org].

            It's in the format; but no one uses it (anymore).

            Of course, these guys did [gamesetwatch.com], but then they're always ahead of their time...

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

              subcode graphics is in parts 2 (text) and 3 (graphics) of the updated Redbook. 'Course, what're you going to do with an entire 480 interlaced lines of real estate and 256 colours? I can't see Terminator: Genisys looking particularly appealing on that.

      • Sorry, but doing what HTML+JavaScript was doing 20 years ago, just in a different container, is not innovative.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        That's kind of the point. It will make his e-book new and innovative. That's how progress happens.

        Except since it hasn't happened, the market pretty much must've rejected it.

        I mean, Apple has iBooks Author, which is a free (beer, on OS X) application for creating "rich" books which can be exported to PDF or EPUB. (There's a licensing thing in there - if you want to sell the book for money, you have to have it approved by Apple for sale in the iBookstore. But if it's free, go nuts - distribute how you see fi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        Could have had it all back in the day with HyperCard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • Could have had it all back in the day with HyperCard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          Although I pine for the days of HyperCard myself, Apple's own iBooks Author [apple.com] pretty much gets you there at this point. It's Free (as in beer) and can be used to create ePub3 books, as well as Apple's (more robust) iBooks format.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      yea its like he wants to jam it full of flash and shockwave

      sorry I just threw up a little at the thought of an EBOOK doing new and innovative things that were already done when CD rom was a big deal

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mysidia ( 191772 )

      You want to publish an e-book but you also want to be able to do things that e-books can't do.

      Use HTML+CSS+JS as your Ebook format, problem solved. The more restricted formats are specifically for wrapping content in DRM encryption and targeting old-style LCD and eInk readers that have limited capabilities than a tablet, and they are not platforms for innovating and providing richly-interactive content.

      iBooks also support Javascript interactivity with EPUB content, and Adobe PDF has support for Ja

    • What nonsense comment is that?

      Got even upmodded, how retarded.

      He only needs to publish in .epub format and everything he wants is done by the eBook reader automatically!

  • [url=http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/]Apple iBooks Author[/url]

    It was designed to be EXACTLY what you are talking about.

  • Kindles can't do this (Score:4)

    by Ozoner ( 1406169 ) on Sunday January 03, 2016 @09:33PM (#51232759)

    The paperwhite Kindles are hopeless at showing images.

    They can't do what you are asking (zoom, etc).

    This has nothing to do with whatever software you used to create the file.

    • Re:Kindles can't do this (Score:4, Informative)

      by John Bokma ( 834313 ) on Sunday January 03, 2016 @10:55PM (#51232963) Homepage
      I own a Kindle touch and it can actually zoom, hold your finger on the image for a while.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Chryana ( 708485 )

      I can't speak for Kindles, but I've owned several Kobos, and they were all terrible for showing any kind of interactive content. Clicking on a link on a page of text is an exercise in frustration, the finger press being interpreted 4/5 times as a page change, and when it works, it will take several seconds, sometimes ~20, to go see the referenced content, which is sometimes just a footnote which was only 2-3 page changes away. They're good for displaying linear content, such as reading a novel, but forget a

  • suggestions from a small publisher (Score:5, Informative)

    by bitingduck ( 810730 ) on Sunday January 03, 2016 @09:46PM (#51232779) Homepage

    If you want equations to come out reasonably, you have to use EPUB 3 or iBooks Author (which isn't open source). The problem you're going to find with EPUB 3 is that most readers don't support it yet, and you might have to distribute it yourself. I have a small publishing company and we recently did a book full of equations and ended up publishing it only on iTunes/iBooks and our own site [bitingduckpress.com]. It has the equations done in MathML so you can copy and paste them into other things. Most of your other features are things we haven't tried to implement, but I suspect will cause the old EPUB 2.x validators to barf (even if it's valid EPUB 2, many distributors are using old validators).

    As far as tools, we tend to export things from Indesign (because a lot of our books are in dead tree format, too) and then fix them up with BBEdit, TextMate, or Sigil. Sigil is nice because it will render the book for you. BBEdit will open a properly zipped up epub file package and let you hand edit things inside, but it doesn't do any of the cross-file updating that Sigil does (e.g. if you change a file name it will get updated where appropriate in Sigil, but you have to do it by hand in BBEdit). TextMate doesn't open epub packages directly, but it's useful as an editor (and any other text editor with regex support will serve you about the same). BBEdit and TextMate both have good regex support (more so than Sigil). I'm partial to BBEdit, while our other editor is partial to TextMate. We have a little "tech tips" section on our main site [bitingduckpress.com] that describes how we export a word file and make an epub from it (it should be about the same with OO), as well as how we do references. Unfortunately there aren't any good epub editors available yet that support references in a reasonable way. Assuming you can figure out the EPUB 3 implementation of the features you want, you should be able to do most of what you need with a good text editor that has good regex support.

    You can run your final product through Epubcheck 3 [github.com] (or whatever version you want) and verify that it's valid. Most distributors use some flavor of epubcheck 2.x and will reject it if your file throws any errors. They may or may not accurately tell you the errors, and like any compiler, you can sometimes fix 30 pages of errors by putting in the correct bit of punctuation just before where the first error is thrown.

  • Kindle or features - pick one (Score:5, Informative)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Sunday January 03, 2016 @09:58PM (#51232813) Homepage Journal
    The Kindle ebooks doesn't do what you're asking for. So either drop the Kindle ebook requirement or abandon those interactive features. My recommended alternative would be a small website. If the hardware has a basic web browser with JavaScript support what you want is trivially doable. FWIW a TiddlyWiki would be very appropriate; self-contained, portable, your content can be easily adapted to it, and extensible for your needs.

  • You described a Web Page or an App (Score:3, Informative)

    by Schezar ( 249629 ) on Sunday January 03, 2016 @10:15PM (#51232877) Homepage Journal

    What you described is not an ebook, and there is no good reason to overload "ebook" with all of what you intend.

    A web page or dedicated app is what you want. Make a phone app and/or a web site with a modern framework. Most people have tablets/phones, which will already render and interact with those formats just fine.

    E-readers are specialized and limited devices that have a shrinking, not growing, user base. Tablets are surpassing them rapidly. There is literally no good reason to do what you are trying to do with any "ebook" format.

    • Re:You described a Web Page or an App (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bitingduck ( 810730 ) on Sunday January 03, 2016 @11:07PM (#51232987) Homepage

      What you described is not an ebook, and there is no good reason to overload "ebook" with all of what you intend.

      There's every good reason to "overload" an ebook with the features that the OP asked for. Many people (probably more than ever) are reading their ebooks on tablets that are perfectly capable of rendering all the features identified, and more. It's quite reasonable to want to put all of that into a neatly packaged file that a person can dl to their tablet and use offline. It's so reasonable that the group that defines the EPUB format has updated the format to support HTML5 in EPUB 3.0, which would be how those features all get implemented. The people who make readers haven't kept up with that-- most readers are still limited to EPUB 2, and many distributors are still using outdated versions of EPUBcheck to validate files, so they reject perfectly valid EPUB 2 files because they're too lazy to update their validator (which is free and open source).

      As a reader of scientific material, I would like to see many of the features that the OP requested-- I read quite a few electronically published papers and books, and unfortunately the most common format remains flat PDF, which kind of sucks for reading technical content on a small tablet. An html based format (like EPUB) that encapsulates the whole paper or book, including scalable images and graphs, copyable equations, and video where appropriate, would be a much preferable format. And don't say "just read it off the web". I do read it off the web, but I also download papers to archive, and if the publisher disappears (it happens) or I stop having access to that publisher (e.g. my employer's library drops the subscription), I'd still like to be able to read the article in its entirety, along with all the multimedia supplements.

      • "when the document is rendered by a Reading System without scripting support or with scripting support disabled, the top-level document content must retain its integrity, remaining consumable by the User without any information loss or other significant deterioration."

        - http://www.idpf.org/epub/301/s... [idpf.org]

      • Bitingduck: Those same tablets can run the app. Did you seriously not think of that? Honest question. HTML5 as mentioned in another post is an excellent choice. An app is great as well. As an average consumer, I'd say an app is what I'd pay for. I can read on my phone or tablet. You'd get the most bang for your buck by making the app.

        • If you do an Epub 3 you only have to do it once and don't have to do the whole app development, and it will also be less of a storage hog and requires development across multiple devices and OS's and requires more work from the developer to allow all the things that ereaders provide. There ends up being a lot of app overhead that you don't need if you just supply content instead of an app. Ebooks that are now Epub 2.0 used to be provided as apps, too, just to give someone a text experience. I don't want

        • Also durability. An app will only run as long as the device and OS that it was made for remains current. If you're generating content that will remain useful for more than a few years the content and markup should be independent of the platform. I have PDFs and HTML that were generated in the late 90's that are still readable on any current device. If they were apps they'd be lost forever when the devices and OS's are gone. Think about dead tree books-- I can (and have) gone back to look at 100 year old

      • It's so reasonable that the group that defines the EPUB format has updated the format to support HTML5 in EPUB 3.0

        Exactly, and there's also the fixed layout ebook format [ebookarchitects.com] Apple introduced on top of EPUB2 which EPUB3 standardizes. I've done PDF to fixed layout ebook conversions that work like a charm and look exactly like the print / PDF version -- given that your device supports fxl ebooks, of course. There are several pdf2fxl ebook / EPUB3 conversion services and tools. I like this one because it has a free [magicepub.com]

    • Tablets are surpassing them rapidly. There is literally no good reason to do what you are trying to do with any "ebook"
      So tablets don't run eBook reading/rendering software?
      That was new to me .... I must be lucky that my old iPad and iBook.app work with .epub just fine.

  • Latex and Our Choice (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Sunday January 03, 2016 @10:22PM (#51232889) Homepage Journal
    First, it annoys me to now end to have to read a 'science' book published in a word processor. It looks ugly and unprofessional and incompetent. It is just my opinion, and I am not going to embarrass anyone by showing examples, but suffice it to say 25 years ago when MS Words was cool we did not know any better, but now if you are doing a science book, do it in LaTex. It will make updates easier.

    Two, look at the Push Pop press technology which published Al Gore's Incontinent Truth, now called Our Choice. Aside from the politics, the technology in the book is everything the post asked for. I am pretty sure it publishes the book as an APP, but as mentioned an ebook is an extremely limited format, especially on a kindle.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by c0d3g33k ( 102699 )

      First, it annoys me to now end to have to read a 'science' book published in a word processor. It looks ugly and unprofessional and incompetent. It is just my opinion, and I am not going to embarrass anyone by showing examples, but suffice it to say 25 years ago when MS Words was cool we did not know any better, but now if you are doing a science book, do it in LaTex. It will make updates easier.

      Two, look at the Push Pop press technology which published Al Gore's Incontinent Truth, now called Our Choice. Aside from the politics, the technology in the book is everything the post asked for. I am pretty sure it publishes the book as an APP, but as mentioned an ebook is an extremely limited format, especially on a kindle.

      It annoys me to no end to read posts with errors like: "... it annoys me to now end", "MS Words" (it's MS Word), "Al Gore's Incontinent Truth" (it's 'An Inconvenient Truth'). Most annoying is getting the capitalization of LaTeX wrong (it's not "LaTex"). It looks ugly and unprofessional and most certainly incompetent.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      25 years ago when MS Word was cool we did not know any better

      Speak for yourself. I've been publishing in TeX since about 1985. I have published thousands of pages in TeX (mostly plain TeX with some LaTeX), and some handful of hundreds in MS Word. MS Word has only in the last decade approached what TeX can do and with the same level of polish (although you have to work much harder to achieve it).

      There are only two advantages that MS Word currently has: (1) ubiquity, meaning that you can be reasonably certain that your colleague will be able to view your document ap

    • but suffice it to say 25 years ago when MS Words was cool we did not know any better, but now if you are doing a science book, do it in LaTex.

      Tex was the format of choice 25 years ago, and Word wasn't cool then either.

      The kindle is an extremely limited device which simply isn't going to do what he wants regardless of format.

      He wants EPUB 3 or iBooks, probably iBooks since its pretty freaking awesome once you get over the shitty side of it being so locked into Apple which means you aren't going to use it since its really worthless outside of Apple :( Damn shame.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      +1 for LaTeX. Learn with what looks great in print and the publishing, editing, peer review experts understand.

    • First, it annoys me to now end to have to read a 'science' book published in a word processor. It looks ugly and unprofessional and incompetent.

      While I strongly encourage science, technical, and academics to consider using TeX / LaTeX for technical or academic documents, not everyone will. There is a learning requirement, and while in my opinion the productivity gains of dealing with equations in TeX rather than in a word processor (even if it has an equation editor) will normally offset the time to learn such new / different system, not everyone will make same conclusion, even with the modern TeX / LaTeX editors / IDE such as TeXmaker, TeXstudio,

  • Good luck with that! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Peter (Professor) Fo ( 956906 ) <devNO@SPAMvulpeculox.net> on Sunday January 03, 2016 @10:24PM (#51232897) Homepage

    (1) Kindles and (much better) e-books don't do that. You might as well have asked for a flying pogo-stick.

    (2) You may be confusing pop-up with box-out or even foot-note. If you want the 'less accomplished' to keep up then you can't do it with pop-ups[1] Instead write two books.

    (3) An e-book reader is not a multi-media volcano of goodness. The opposite: A constrained text reader with occasional images and no character.

    [Footnote 1] Note that a box-out remains in clear view forever. A pop-up vanishes after first use, so after being shown it isn't there for re-reference. A footnote a diversion for someone with a particular interest.

    • You might as well have asked for a flying pogo-stick.

      Now that you mention it, I would like one of those....

  • I have an iBook from several years ago of 'Yellow Submarine' (a variation of the movie featuring music of the Beatles). Pretty much every page has sound, animation, text, images ... and I can't remember if it includes extensive reader interaction. These Apple format books probably work on all devices where Kindle works (with the likely exception of proprietary, exclusionary devices).

    Assuming that things have improved in 2016, it's probably a better platform now. I hear from creators that iBooks are easy to

    • iBooks only work on iOS devices. The iBooks application states specifically that you are only to use it to develop books for the iOS platform as well.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by swell ( 195815 )

        Quite right according to http://www.apple.com/ibooks-au... [apple.com]
        Only available for iOS & Mac at the moment.
        Sorry to have assumed that, like iTunes, Apple would open the platform.

        Contract terms are worth a close look. I've heard vague suggestions that both Apple and Amazon want exclusive access to your work; also that they want to dictate prices on their platform and elsewhere. (You can't sell elsewhere at a lower price...) But again, that is rumor and I can't find time to dig in for actual facts. OTOH, an ope

      • iBooks only work on iOS devices. The iBooks application states specifically that you are only to use it to develop books for the iOS platform as well.

        But iBooks Author can publish in ePub3 format, and PDF, too, as well as the (much more robust) iBooks format.

        • It appears they updated the EULA afterwards. Before that, it expressly did not permit selling outside Apple platforms.
          http://venomousporridge.com/po... [venomousporridge.com]

          • It appears they updated the EULA afterwards. Before that, it expressly did not permit selling outside Apple platforms. http://venomousporridge.com/po... [venomousporridge.com]

            Which would have made some sense when it was iBooks-format only. But now that you can Publish in ePub, it makes just as much sense that they changed that part of the EULA, too, right?

          • We have to be specific here. The EULA says that the iBook may not be offered for sale outside Apple's service, which I suspect would be struck down by the first judge that saw it. It says nothing about anything you turned into an eBook using Calibre or similar software. Apple may still be engaging in illegal price-fixing, but that's another issue. It's still disturbing, but it isn't as bad as some have claimed.

            • If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a âoeWorkâ), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

              Originally it was not worded to only be iBooks.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Sorry pal, but what you want totally blows the lid off generic e-book specs.
    E-Books are a mess as it is - it's difficult enough doing such simple things as getting usable layouts across various readers and devices, despite the whole e-book thing being based on web-technologies. Or should I say 'because'? And it's things like that that should be easy with ebooks.

    What you want to do is build an app for tablets and phlablets. There perhaps web technologies are the best way to go - you'd build your mulitmedia '

  • Multiple WTFs (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Ecuador ( 740021 )

    No offense, but your post is a WTF galore. Let us start by the fact that you wrote a scientific book on LibreOffice. You say you are willing to learn programming etc to add some "bells and whistles" and yet you did not seem to want to learn a proper tool for the main part of the work, which is writing the actual book.
    Then, you want to add various things to ebooks, when most people like ebooks exactly because they can't do those things. Sure you could have an interactive website come up on an Android tablet

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Let us start by the fact that you wrote a scientific book on LibreOffice. You say you are willing to learn programming etc to add some "bells and whistles" and yet you did not seem to want to learn a proper tool for the main part of the work, which is writing the actual book.

      You're missing that they actually wrote the book. So rather than spending time learning a tool, they actually accomplished their task.

      Astonishing, huh?

  • In order to be read on tablets you have to format it as EPUB, the standard that most world reads. For kindle you will have to convert it to mobi. As for bells and whistles, this is done in HTML5 Coversion to kindle can be done later using kindle convert by Amazon. Contact me in private for more information about creating an EPUB.

  • iBooks (Score:2)

    by Tom ( 822 )

    I've published an e-book and worked on a 2nd (not yet published). The 2nd one I wanted the same. It should have been more than a book, with bells and whistles as you say.

    I used iBooks, which has all these features built-in. I got them to work. Then I pulled most of them out again and made a simple book.

    So if you are absolutely sure that the bells and whistles will actually give you something: Most ebook formats are basically HTML and they do support a subset of Javascript. Good luck getting it to run on mor

  • The EPUB3 format is just HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, some metadata, and a couple other things I can't remember right now, all packaged up in a .ZIP file with a different file name extension. The spec literally allows ANYTHING you can do on a web site.

    Except, no current EPUB readers will handle anything much more than just displaying the text, let alone any kind of persistence. You can do all that you want, and much more. But no one will see it. It's as if the HTML5 standard had been released but the only brow

  • This is off the main topic, but seeing as the Kobo Aura I bought does not have any way to zoom on images, I'd like to consider an alternative product.
    The Kobo lets me change font size very easily, but that doesn't affect the pictures. (in either pdf or epub documents)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by websta ( 920096 )
      The Kindle shows images within the text, yet when you click on them, they appear full screen as an overlay. No further zooming, at least in my model.
  • FWIW, my suggestion is to just link to a dedicated website where you can offer the additional interactivity and higher resolution images. Ebooks are basic HTML (like that used in an email), contained in a zip file, which is renamed a mobi or epub wrapper. There are some additional requirements for the formats, but that's about it. Amazon strongly recommends (nearly requires) that their own online-submission software convert your book into mobi format, and you can convert that file into epub similarly (fr

  • I have created Java code that makes image-heavy, interactive ebooks in several formats. It has been quite a learning experience.

    Feel free to contact me off-group:

    bobswansong "at"

    gmail

    """dot"""

    com

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