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Ask Slashdot: Composing an e-Book With a Couple of Bells and Whistles
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.
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.
Just be HTML+javascript. Then you'll have modern Kindles (assuming they can run web browsers) and the other 99% of the market too!
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.
Calibre
You want to publish an e-book but you also want to be able to do things that e-books can't do.
Your choice is to use HTML5/CSS3 in NF8 format (Since its a kindle) or HTML5/CSS3 or HTML5/CSS3 or any combination of those three.
HTML+CSS+JS
[url=http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/]Apple iBooks Author[/url]
It was designed to be EXACTLY what you are talking about.
We tried something similar (with different bells and whistles than the ones you describe but not too different) and ended up doing the book as an HTML5 website. The gist of it? Still sucks, but at least it's possible that way.
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.
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. 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 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 (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.
Books with interactive diagrams. http://gobooks.com/index.html
If you're willing to code it can certainly be done but I've never seen anything like it elsewhere.
There are a surprisingly large number of authors writing in iBook format, precisely because it permits arty variations the other formats don't.
HTML
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
But as you already said: that's a markup language. What are you using to render it?
bickerdyke
TeXStudio can produce PDF files straight from the LaTeX code. I also recommend it (not gp).
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.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
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.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
(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.
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 assemble.
You can wait a few more years/decades for other authoring systems to catch up. Or you can beat yourself up trying to hack something together. Do you want to publish or do you want to fiddle?
...omphaloskepsis often...
Kindles do have a web browser, albeit a primitive one. Why not admit to yourself that you don't want to make an e-book. You want to make an interactive, electronic document. We have the technology for that now: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Another little known fact is that PDF documents can also include JavaScript -- but it's trickier and not every PDF reader supports them.
Depending on what your book is about you can either use regular HTML to build it or, if you have lots of complex math consider using LaTeX or even Apache FOP and then some other magic to add JavaScript forms to PDF. But MathML and SVG support make HTML/CSS/JavaScript able to handle many technical documents.
When I do my writing I either choose LaTeX for more math-y type documents or HTML/CSS/MathML for more technical reference. The former allowing for great paper reproduction and math typesetting while the latter has better indexing and can be easily added to existing documents.
Or consider the obvious: Publish a proper e-book and then link to an interactive site to manage the interactive portion.
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Remember those adventure books where you make a decision and it tells you to turn to a certain page? The same idea there can be useful here, with a little basic HTML magic and some CSS. CSS and HTML that Kindle, including paperwhite, and the older e-ink reader without light, recognize and utilize.
HTML: Use anchor links to jump to other anchor tags. that is, <a href="#answer1">[some text]lt;/a> will go to the anchor <a name="answer1"></a>. This will jump on the page. If it's incorrect, then you can put a link back to <a href="#question1">try again</a>.
CSS: make great use of the page-break-before and page-break-after properties. They are amazing at ending and starting chapters, and with plenty of them, you can add the answer/question segments.
It's not the most innovative way, but it avoids the need for javascript or some proprietary format. Then, you can publish on any platform that supports both things.
As far as users skipping ahead? Well, that's like trying to erase the answers to every other math equation in the back of th algebra book.
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 'book' (streching the term, are we?) with web tech (HTML 5, CSS 3, JS, etc.) and then package and distribute it to android and ios using cordova or some other web-2-app process.
The other alternative would be to build native apps for both plattforms - but that seems like overkill.
You C++ and Python skills may be neat, but of no use to this project. You're biggest issue will be packaging a webapp for deployment via the app-store and getting it to build and run correctly using cordova or something like that. Perhaps a commercial IDE for this sort of thing (Titanium? ... Don't know - ask the all-knowing landfill) would be of use to you and the extra few hundred bucks for such a thing a good investment.
Bottom line: Adjust your requirements to what ebooks actually can do - not what they claim to do (test this) - which would mean ditching about 99% of the interaction extravaganza you have in mind or build an app that resembles your multimedia experience, preferably with the web-tech method mentioned above. All else you had in mind won't fly. That's a fact.
Good luck with your project - sounds interesting.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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 (or the Kindle Fire) and perhaps that is what you are really after, but if you are talking e-books as in media for e-book readers the best of which have nice e-ink displays, there is no interactivity, no fancy graphics and zooming, just a relaxing reading experience similar to a book ( but usually lighter and with nice included night light, dictionary etc
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Kindle doesn't support what you want to do.
Apple does, and you can do it with iBooks Author, but its closed source, commercial distribution needs to through iBooks.app on Apple devices or from your own web site.
Adobe Indesign would also work, but again, that is closed source, and you still need to publish to something other than a kindle.
Push Pop Press is another commercial, closed source way, that publishes the book as an App.
screwdriver as a pry bar?
Just go with PDF - it has all the capabilities you could ever need in a single, portable, format. Not restricted to Kindle, or some specific e-viewer stacke.
And, if you want some goofy DRM... yea, you can bake that in there as well.
And before any bonehead spouts off about proprietary this, that or the otherthing... you might want to go check out ISO 32000 and ISO 32000-2.
The file format has ALL the capabilities you need - now, can the viewer handle what you want to throw at it? That depends... Adobe (obviously), FoxIT, and a few others are pretty good. As for OS/X Preview, on the other had, let's just say that 'Fruit Company' has absolutely no idea what they are doing in this space. It's not your PDF that's broken - it's preview that's broken. No matter what the FanBoyz would like you to think.
Just like any other highly-skilled trade - Learn which tools you should use for the right job.
FredInIT
Have a look at Scrivener (http://literatureandlatte.com/). The Mac and Windows versions are ongoing but the Linux version is halted. Regardless, it's the best and easiest authoring program I know of.
Ipython Notebooks (http://ipython.org/notebook.html)
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.
E books have all the functionality of a regular book.
Sorry, but it can't be done.
Try tellingbooks, they support copy and a lot of media formats. http://tellingbooks.com/ the first books are free, if you make multiple they charge a fee.
"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...
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 more than one device, though.
Your best approach is probably what you already outlined: Make it an app written in whatever framework or programming language you want, because at that point what you are familiar with is the most important. There are probably make-your-own-interactive-story tools and such that provide a framework, but by my experience they are all too limited and if you can write code, you're better off writing code.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I have been working on epub format for a couple of years. Not sure about the testing, but epub version 3 has more capability to include sound and video then epub 2.0. The advantage is that it will work fine in ibook on iOS and free epub readers on android (fbreader, Gitden reader), zoom in and out, etc. all work. Kindle uses it's own format and will not work yet with sound, video not sure about pictures.
Hi,
did you try out http://extensions.openoffice.o... ?
It runs well on my system
I had the same problem when writing a "e-textbook" for computer graphics and games. Although I've published several major textbooks in the field, no publisher was interested or had good technology. So I wrote it myself and set up my own online store.
The result was the The Graphics Codex, which is packaged as an iOS app and a website authorized via Amazon accounts. The back end uses HTML + Mathjax for the heavy lifting and provides a LaTeX-like syntax for the author. I released a rewrite of lot of the fundamental technology as open source in Markdeep.
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.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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 browser available was the first version of Mozilla. Why no one has updated their EPUB readers is beyond me.
So, given that, your only options right now seem to be what others have suggested: build an app or a website. {Well, you could also release the HTLM, etc. as a downloadable collection of files, in a .ZIP file. But, sadly, very few people would bother to or have the wherewithal to actually download that and put it on their machine correctly.} Perhaps you could build the website with all your interractivity, use almost the same code to build the EPUB3 document, let people read the EPUB3 while offline and then go to the web site for the interactive bits. Then wait for EPUB3 readers to catch up.
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)
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Next up on Ask Slashdot: "How do you use BBcode in Slashdot Comments?"
It's been about a year since I've chatted with them, but last I heard, they were developing exactly what you're looking for- a progressively enhanced ebook publishing platform. The devices and platforms that can support advanced functionality get them. Everything else gets fallbacks.
Looks like they are still in beta, but the demo I got was full-featured and working quite some time ago!
I used to date this nutty bat-shit crazy girl that dropped out of school when she got pregnant at 13. She write a 5 star novel (low reading level). He goal in life is to become a rapper. She's also dumb as hell... But she was smart enough to use hyperlinks at the end of her book that linked her to a profile.
Zooming can be done already by the user via pinch and spread. Less people are using the older style kindles as tablets are more popular AND more people read from their phone because it's always on them and unless it's purely study time, I'm not carrying iPad or kindle. And real books are always the preferred.
As for pop-ups... Who is to say you aren't loading an account-stealing software in it? Or an advertisement. Certain limitations are in place for a reason.
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 (free online), and that's what most people are doing, in one direction or the other. Additional specialized conversion software isn't really necessary. For example, AFAIK, most authors use Word, then convert that document free online into ePub (with maybe a little editing of the file, renamed as a zip file, unzipped, altered, resaved as zip, and retitled as epub). Then they upload the epub or word to amazon kdp to convert to mobi. FYI, choosing an image in a kindle ebook automatically zooms in to fill the screen with the image, but that's it -- no further zooming. Comic book formats/readers do that but not mobi. The reason that most books forego images is because Amazon charges for them (download fees based on file size), sharply reducing the books profitability. So, K.I.S.S., and your best bet is to link to an otherwise unpublicized website. Major publishers will publish, for instance, craft books with templates, patterns, and other printables, which simply includes a wide-open URL to a website which literally contains the entire contents of the book. No passwords, no security, no nothing, other than the site asking Google not to index the site. Alternately, you could offer purchasers a PDF copy, with full images etc, for registering on your site with a proof of purchase or something, but the response would likely be limited, and you don't want to undermine your main publication ("get the REAL book here in a clumsier format").
As everyone have said, even though I don't think your interactivity requirements are too high, the eBook format is not the way to go, even less with Kindle.
iBooks is what you're looking for, while Im not a fan of Apple and your book reach would be lower, technically, iBook Author is the best tool for the job. It's sad the .pub standards were badly designed, the iBook format while far from perfect is way better than .pub. The learning curve is nil, saving the apple tax OTOH any beefed up 2009 MB can run 10.11 and iBA just fine.
Another advice is to look for help with the art department, look for a designer, even a web developer has more insight in what you need, which is trivial for them. You don't like marketing designing your code? It works both ways. You'll end up with an iBook, an App or a Website either way.
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