What Nixonland means for EPUB

Update, 25 May 2011: I have recently published a new miniguide explaining exactly how to add audio and video files to your EPUB formatted ebooks so that they work properly and look great in iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, as well as NOOK Color. You can find more information in this article.


I wrote last week about Simon and Schuster's new “enhanced” edition of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, with vintage videos, that had made it into Apple's iBookstore, despite not being able to pass EpubCheck 1.0.5, one of Apple's stipulated requirements for inclusion.

There are a couple of reasons why this is so significant. First of all, it implies that Apple has no interest in supporting XHTML 1.1's object element, which is an existing way of embedding video that would have passsed EpubCheck. I have experimented with many different permutations of the object element with iBooks with no luck at all. It not only doesn't show video, it doesn't fall back to the alternate content. Bascially iBooks doesn't seem to support object at all.

Second, it marks Apple's, and perhaps EPUB's, path toward HTML5. It is no coincidence that the one non-complying piece of Nixonland is a tag from HTML5. Not an Apple proprietary extension, not a weird JavaScript, but part of the language that both Apple and Google have been heavily promoting for the last year or so. How long can it be before EPUB supports HTML5, EpubCheck validates HTML5, and Nixonland and other video-containing ebooks are legitimate entries in the iBookstore?

Third, it's interesting to note that Nixonland uses .m4v videos, and that those videos are properly declared in the content.opf file as video/mpeg4. I recommend the rest of us do the same.

Fourth, there is no sign of audio in the Nixonland sample files, Apple says, "This book is enhanced with content such as audio or video..." but actually it turns out to be all video. I think that's because HTML5's audio element isn't yet fully baked (or supported). I can get audio to work, but it's buggy at best. (More on that soon.)

Fifth, the Nixonland sample contains four videos which all together contain eleven minutes and 15 seconds of video. The sample weighs in at 127Mb. The full book takes up 447 Mb. That's a pretty hefty file. Assuming the same quality, that means the full book has about 39 minutes and 34 seconds of video.

Finally, what I think Nixonland only begins to demonstrate is why we want video in a book anyway. I'm not a Nixon aficionado, so I can't begin to judge the usefulness and relevance of these videos given the surrounding text, but I'd be interested to hear what others think.

I've created a new, but still tiny example of a video enhanced ebook (with explanations) so you can pull it apart and look at the code, and also see why it might be a good idea to have videos in ebooks. There's a bit at the end with more explicit instructions. Even though it's tiny, with just 7 short videos, it still takes up 50 Mb! Note that the only errors that this book generated in EpubCheck are due to the use of the video element; that is, exactly the same errors that Nixonland produces.