Bluefire Blog

Someone suggested that I post a demo of what I’m talking about in my last post.  So, we’ve quickly put together a  very, very crude demo of an actual ePub file with rich media.  This demo comes in the form of a fictitious book called “Cross Domain” with an “Ebook Xtras” section that lets you listen to audio, view video, look at book covers in a cover flow and link out to websites.

Download Rich Media ePub

1.  “Audio Book ” - this is a simple little audio player mockup and only the “play” button works (click it again to stop playback)

2. “Discuss on Forums” - this is simply a link out to a book discussion forum website

3. “Editorial Reviews”  - also just a website link right now

4. “Meet the Writer” - a video interview

5. “More by this Author” - a cover flow like list of EPUB files on Feedbooks.com

You’ll need Adobe Digital Editions to view the demo.

You can download the Rich Media Epub file here.

Enjoy! - Micah

NY times has an interesting essay on promotional websites for books.  I’ve been so focused recently on rich media INSIDE ebooks, this reminds me to keep an eye on the bigger picture.

Thibault Imbert has posted source code of “SmileyRenderer” a class for inserting emoticons into Flash Player 10 Text Layout Framework text flows over at ByteArray.org.  Oh happy Day! 

The folks over at Ebook Rumors wrote up a complimentary review of the Digital Editions “feel”.  How nice to hear good stuff this winter.  Reminds me to do that for others more often.

Creating a Thumbnail Grid

Introduction

In Part 1 of this tutorial we stepped through the process of fetching and parsing an RSS feed from Feedbooks.com the results of which were bound to a DataGrid UI Control.

In this post we will detail how we can use the new WrapPanel and ViewBox controls, which are a part of the  Silverlight Toolkit December 2008 release to create grid of thumbnails from a Feedbooks RSS source.

Download Source

Feedbooks RSS Browser Application

See it in Action

(more…)

Tutorial - Creating a Simple Silverlight RSS Reader

Introduction

This is the first post of a multipart blog tutorial explaining how to create a simple Silverlight 2.0 Web Application that displays a grid of thumbnails from a Feedbooks RSS source.  Under each thumbnail is a button that allows users to download an ePub version of the book to their desktop.

Download Source See also: Tutorial Part 2

Feedbooks RSS Browser

See it in Action

In this first part we are going to step through the process of fetching and parsing an RSS feed with Silverlight and then bind the RSS data to a Silverlight DataGrid control.

(more…)