From the MPS blog:
While most people were enjoying a well-deserved break, our EPUB 3 team has been busy working on a sample for the iPad. The first cut is below. We’ve tried to show almost all of the EPUB 3 features currently supported by the iPad which can be seen (remember a lot of EPUB 3′s magic happens at the backend) including:
- Multimedia: audio and video; animations; slide shows
- Complex and fixed layouts: print-replica layouts, structured and hyperlinked indexes, embedded fonts, support for high-design content like textbooks
- Non-Roman scripts: font support, vertical layouts, right-to-left text and page progression
- Accessibility and early learning: support for accessibility standards, read aloud for children
Watch the video here
We’d love to get your feedback on the sample and hear your thoughts on EPUB 3 in general – does it meet your expectations, which features will be the most useful, what are your plans for EPUB 3. Post a comment below or join the conversation on the EPUB 3 and HTML5 LinkedIn group here
The demo is nice, but wow, Macmillan refuses to share any of the technical solutions as far as HTML/CSS/JavaScript. I can’t believe they think that’s a legitimate form of competitive knowledge, and I assume it’s because the people in charge either aren’t aware of how HTML coding has historically worked (i.e. through open dialogues with other developers), or they disagree with that approach, even though it’s the most efficient way to rapidly grow a good body of technical knowledge. I mean, it’s not like an embedded video is going to sell a book to a consumer. It’s still about content, not markup language.
My feedback. 1. The complex and fixed layout features are much needed, but if you’re going to promote this features further, get someone who understands typography and layout to make them look better. The pages you show look like they were done in Microsoft Word by someone in the sales department. 2. With the exception of children’s books, embedded videos are a nuisance. They can turn a 300K book file into a 120 meg one. That makes it a nuisance to download and to store, particularly since we’ll probably only watch that video once.. Most of us have WiFi access. Link to a streaming video instead. 3. Quality video production takes a lot of skill and expense. For most books, that makes no sense financially. Give us a good online interview with the author and that’ll be enough.
I like how a demo of future tech is a bunch of stuff that’s been possible in iBooks for months. Nice try.
I’m pleased to see better support for other scripts. I hope the standard also includes Unicode as the default character set. To test Unicode support, try your format/app with Vietnamese. (Vietnamese is all over the Unicode plane, and uses combined diacritics. I used to break software with it all the time, but at this stage, there really shouldn’t be any software left which doesn’t support Unicode properly.)
@ Clytie
It should use Unicode, EPUB 3 harmonizes with a bunch of other standards, including HTML5, and UTF-8 is the recommended encoding for that (and is required to be supported)