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Rich Media EPUB Demo

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.

Ebook Xtras Page Meet the Writer Video

AudioBook Page Thumbnail More by the Author thumbnail

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

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Rich Media EPUB Demo”

  1. Patrick Says:
    March 2nd, 2009 at 12:06 pm

    Good catch. I posted one with a toc up there now. Let us know how it works.

    Patrick.

  2. admin Says:
    March 2nd, 2009 at 12:43 pm

    Debbie,
    Currently iPhone does not support Flash media types. Hopefully that will change soon, but for the moment, you’d want to craft the epub so that it degrades gracefully when viewed on platforms with limited media format support. While it may take some time for Flash to get to iPhone , it might well be possible sooner to use specific media types that have broader support. E.g. perhaps video clips could be in H264 format, which could be displayed by Quicktime, Flash, and (soon) Silverlight depending on what the device supports. That said, I do not know of an iPhone epub reader that currently supports any video playback. Though it seems that it could be added soon if there was demand/content. I think the desktop is going to have to be the place where the envelope is first pushed, and that could prompt support on the mobile side.