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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.
You want to publish an e-book but you also want to be able to do things that e-books can't do.
[url=http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/]Apple iBooks Author[/url]
It was designed to be EXACTLY what you are talking about.
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.
Calibre is nice for converting among formats but doesn't support detailed editing of the source files. If you just stick an OO formatted file in and have it convert, it will do it, but you're likely to need a lot of hand tweaking to get it to look like you want and pass the validators.
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
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.
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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...
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no, sigil. https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook... calibre is wonderful for sorting a finished product, but the conversion tool usually does more harm than good.
Both you and bitingduck need to catch up with recent developments. Calibre does editing and is basically the successor to Sigil, since development stalled on the latter awhile back. Calibre's editor incorporates most Sigil features and is actively developed.
http://manual.calibre-ebook.co...
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
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you need to keep up-to-date, too.
Sigil 0.92 was released on Dec 18 2015.
here's what the latest entry on http://sigil-ebook.com/ says:
Sigil-0.9.2 Released
December 18, 2015 ~ kevinbhendricks
Sigil 0.9.2 is a bug fix and stability improvement release of the stable Sigil-0.9.X series. It includes all of the changes and improvements so far and it has shown itself to be very stable in testing. Most of the changes from our last release Sigil-0.9.1 are bug fixes:
Bug Fixes:
. Update BuildingOnLinux docs
. Update Building on Mac OS X docs
. Fix example clips/searches loading on Linux
. Simplify UseBundledInterpreter Logic
. Fix bug when adding existing html links to stylesheets not being updated
. Fix bug in Well-Formed error messages due to bug inside gumboâ(TM)s error.c
. Add xmlns=âhttp://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml attribute to html tag if missing
. Fix lost DOCTYPE info when splitting or merging
. Completely rework pretty printing via gumbo to be much more robust
. Make identification and storage of page-map.xml more robust
. Restore Sigilâ(TM)s update checker thatâ(TM)s been broken for a while
. Update sigil_bs4 prettyprint_xhtml and serialize_xhtml routines to use logic of code in GumboInterface
. Update sigil_bs4 to use numeric entities when faced with nbsp so they do not get lost later in Sigil
. Fix bugs in sigil_bs4/prettyprint_xhtml and serialize_xhtml routines that failed to handle some void tags properly
. Fix out of date error message referencing Tidy
. Coerce missing or bad doctypes to meet either epub2 or epub3 standard
. Inject empty title tag if missing from head
. Html escape Index entry text used to create index.html
Improvements:
. Include Pull Request 161 by pinotree âoeSwitch TempFolder to QTemporaryDirâ to improve safety
. Preliminary Linux binary installer support added
. Add ability to change Sigilâ(TM)s user preferences directory by specifying a new path via the SIGIL_PREFS_DIR environment variable (path must be user-writable).
User Interface Changes:
. Add some keyboard accelerators to the Spell Check dialogue see Sigil Issue# 164
. Completely revamp Cleaning to use âoeMend Codeâ and remove PrettyPrintGumbo as on option
. Rename PrettyPrintGumbo to âoeMend and Prettifyâ and move to CodeView Right-click menu and Tools Menu
. Rename âoeSanity Checkâ to âoeWell-Formed Check EPUBâ and remove check icon people confused with FlightCrew
. Change ToValidXHTML by using serialize not prettyprint
It is hoped this release will provide a stable and up-to-date version of Sigil while development work continues on adding some additional epub3 support features.
Good. Competition is healthy.
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.
"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
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
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").
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