I'm interested in creating downloadable ebooks that include video and other multimedia elements. As I understand it -- and I'm new to this, so please correct me -- publications like Wired use Adobe InDesign to create these multimedia elements.
Are there alternatives to InDesign that are cheaper or less locked down? What would you use if you were going to do something like this?
What output format(s) do you want to end up with?
Because if .epub is the answer, then your friendly neighborhood web-page-authoring software is likely your best bet.
Replying to @Dorothea Salo's post:
Hi Dorothea, and thanks. Yes, I was thinking of .epub, unless others out there recommend against it. Can you help me understand the process of webpage-to-epub conversion? I'm afraid I'm revealing the depths of my ignorance here, but I don't understand how a webpage gets to be a portable ebook.
Replying to @Miriam Posner's post:
If you take a look at the ePub format page on Wikipedia you'll see that "ePub" is little more than a bunch of *ML files zipped up. As such, the friendly neighborhood web-page-authoring software helps you make what you need to create and distribute an ePub. Check Wikipedia for examples and links for the next steps beyond the basic skeletons.
Sharon K. Goetz
Member
I've heard good things about Sigil: MobileRead description, official site. Haven't used it yet myself. You might also look at Threepress's tools. Though it's certainly true that epub is an XML zip, there's a bit more complexity to it than that re: evolved conventions.
ETA Having clicked through to the Wikipedia page now, I see that those two are listed there, but it might be quicker to start with fewer options. :)
sebastian.rahtz@gmail.com
Member
If you want to make ePub books from existing digital content, the Text Encoding Initiative is always there to help. Making ePub books from TEI is easy (several people have written setups, including me). Adding video and audio is a little more troublesome, as they are not formally part of ePub at the moment. You need to think carefully about your target audience before going down that root.
I enjoy reading the blog at http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/ on this subject.
ebooks != epub, of course.
First of all, thanks a million -- this is terrifically helpful.
Sharon, would you be willing to say a bit more about the complexity of moving from XML to ePub? Or if it's too complicated to go into, can you recommend a resource on the subject?
Sebastian, can you explain what you mean about a target audience? Do you mean that audio and video components might be less stable over time because they're not formally supported by the ePub?
And if anyone cares to weigh in on the relative merits of ePub versus other ebook formats, I'd be very grateful for that response as well.
If it isn't too rude to plug a project I'm a developer for, the Anthologize wordpress plugin is designed to take content from a WP site and publish it as ePub (among other formats). It's still early on (latest release was 0.5-alpha. read: still bugs and issues), but might be something to look at.
The multimedia aspect is interesting. . . is support for that getting common in ebook readers? If so, there might be some tickets to file in Anthologize! :)
sebastian.rahtz@gmail.com
Member
What I meant by target audience is that if you are producing content for eg iPad and iPhone, you can safely use video and audio in epub, confident that your readers will enjoy them. If you are targetting any ebook reader in the world (eg inc. Kindle) then you'd better be very conservative indeed in the facilities you use.
Another route is Apple's iWork Pages, by the way, supposedly has ePub export (never tried it).
BTW I know InDesign is not cheap, and is complex, but actually it probably only costs a day's salary or less. So the investment is not that great. Personally, I'd always prefer to edit XML and go from there but I realize I am in a minority :-}
Replying to @Patrick Murray-John's post:
Patrick, I love Anthologize and would personally love to see multimedia support. I'll file a ticket! I don't know how common multimedia ebooks are -- as you can tell, I'm still figuring this whole ebook thing out -- but what I'm hearing from grad students is something along the lines of, "I have this awesome [public domain] work that I know better than anyone else in the world, and I'd really like to create an ebook that's enriched with multimedia annotation." I'm wondering how I can help support this.
I really like the idea of going from WordPress, which a number of grad students are already familiar with, to a multimedia-enhanced Anthologize ebook.
And thanks again, all. This has really helped me figure out which questions I need to be asking about which technologies. Googling was leading me down too many garden paths.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Sophie, an open source project from the Institute for the Future of the Book. Sophie is especially designed as a platform to create media-rich, interactive books.
The chief drawback of Sophie is that Sophie ebooks require the Sophie Reader. But that's not so much of a drawback when you consider that the Sophie Reader runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Slight caution with Sophie: its developers (mighty and brilliant though they are) have a history of abandoning projects. Also, you will be cutting off a lot of your potential audience if you require a software download, no matter how cross-platform (and no iOS or Android support would give me pause as well).
You might think about giving Calibre a try (Windows, Mac or Linux)
Can create epub format but also does MOBI (for you Kindle)
Converts between many formats.
Oh yeah, it does have just about the ugliest, counter-intuitive interface I've ever seen (and I've been around a pretty long time).
One more suggestion (Mac only)
Over the past week or so I've been using Scrivener 2.0 for Mac. It has the ability to export .epub as well as .mobi (for Kindle) files. I haven't tried epub as I'm a Kindle user but I can tell you Scrivener does a very nice job producing multimedia (e.g., text and images) documents for Kindle. You have to go to Amazon and download their free kindlegen utility (Scrivener walks you through that one-time process) and then it's really as simple as click and publish to any number of formats.
RTF, PDF, Word (doc,docx), Open Office (.odt), ePub, Kindle (.mobi), html, plain text and few others (e.g., multimarkdown)
You must log in to post.
A project of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Chronicle of Higher Education's ProfHacker
Icons by famfamfam
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
