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