Why iBooks for Mac Matters (Goodbye, PDF!)

We folks who create ebooks have been waiting for iBooks for Mac for a long time as a testing tool. Copying EPUB files from one device to another is a hassle and being able to see a book right where you've created it is frankly, this side of wonderful.

But of course, we #eprdctn people are not at all the point. Apple's release of iBooks for Mac in its new Mavericks operating system is a huge step for ebooks and EPUB because it makes EPUB available where people want to use it: on their desktops. The fact that this is the very same format—and the very same files—that works in their ereaders and tablets is icing on the cake.

Have you ever tried to send someone an ebook? It's not fun. Most normal people out in the world have never heard of EPUB and if you start explaining how to download a Firefox extension or make them buy a program to open it, they'll smile (if you're lucky) and go do something else.

Up until now, if you wanted someone to be able to open an ebook easily, you sent it in PDF format. And frankly, PDF is a dead end. It works ok on a computer, but it's miserable for reading on smaller devices. (No apologies to you PDF folks, sorry, and don't flame me in the comments. I don't care that on some Android devices, a PDF is slightly readable. I want an open, universal, flexible, standard format, and that's EPUB.)

What's PDF's great advantage? After years of downloading Adobe Acrobat Reader, most people have it on their computers, and when they double-click a PDF, something miraculous happens: it opens.

The last Pew Research Center poll about ebook reading (April 2012) says that more people read ebooks on their computers than on any other devices. In fact, 42% of the Americans who had read an ebook had read it on their computers, similar to the 41% who read on black and white ereaders, 29% on cell phones, and 23% on tablets. And that was 18 months ago, in the US.

In Spain in 2012, just to give one example in Europe, 55.8% of ebook readers use a computer to read their ebooks, compared with only 6.6% who use ereaders. According to the Spanish Publishers Guild only 9.7% even own an ereader. (I wished they gathered data about mobile phone reading, but they don't.)

At any rate, until Mavericks, if they were reading on a computer, they were reading in PDF. But Apple changes that. Not only has Apple released a fairly decent EPUB reader—that supports both EPUB2 and EPUB3, and both fixed and flowing formats—the most important thing is that iBooks for Mac is included in the Mavericks installation automatically.

That means people don't have to even know iBooks exists. You send them an EPUB file, they double-click it, and it opens.





Pure magic. They can read all kinds of ebooks, as large or small as they like, with JavaScript, audio, video, media overlays (read aloud), and in Asian languages with right-to-left page progression where necessary. It just works.

Now, why was that so hard?

Versioning in iBooks 3 (part 1)

Another promising new feature announced by Tim Cook about iBooks 3 is the ability to make updates to an ebook, and then make those updates available to readers who have already bought the book. There were a few minor errors in my Monarch Butterfly book so I decided I would use it as a guinea pig to test versioning.

The first thing to note is that versioning only exists for EPUB 3 documents. They can be flowing or fixed layout, but they have to be EPUB 3.

So, my first task was to update the Monarch Butterfly fixed layout book to EPUB 3.

Changes to the OPF file

I began with the OPF file, adding version="3.0" to the initial package element and adding the namespaces that Apple recommends.

I updated the title of my book to indicate the version number, though I'm not sure this is necessary (or desired).

I added the required modification date and time:

<meta property="dcterms:modified">2012-11-06T12:00:00Z</meta>

Pay special attention to the time format: CCYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ. I tried putting just the year, and EpubCheck gave me an error. Note that both the T and the Z are required.

To make sure my fonts are recognized, Apple now requires this line instead of the com.apple.ibooks.metadata.plist file:

<meta property="ibooks:specified-fonts">true</meta>

And then comes the part where Apple lets you specify the version of your book. You are allowed two dots and three components (so 1.2.1) and up to four numbers per component (which seems excessive, frankly). And these aren't decimal numbers: trailing 0's count to keep them ordered; 1.10 is later than 1.9.

<meta property="ibooks:version">1.1</meta><!--controls versioning in iBooks3-->

Then, since my book is fixed layout, I had to add the EPUB 3 specific metadata:

<meta property="rendition:layout">pre-paginated</meta>
<meta property="rendition:spread">auto</meta>
<meta property="rendition:orientation">auto</meta>

Because my books' pages include Javascript, I had to add properties="scripted" to each of the pages which links to a Javascript file, even if it didn't use Javascript in that particular page.

<item id="milkweed" href="milkweed.xhtml" media-type="application/xhtml+xml" properties="scripted" />

And then I removed the guide section, which is no longer required by Apple (and was already deprecated in the EPUB 3 spec).

</spine>
<!--new to 1.1 guide is removed -->
</package>

New TOC file

EPUB 3 requires a new XHTML-based TOC file, which is a lot easier to write than the old toc.ncx format, since it's just formed by an ol list with links to the various TOC entries. For a Fixed Layout book, for which you want iBooks to create its graphic TOC (made of the covers of the books), just create a single entry to the first page, or cover in my case:

<nav id="toc" epub:type="toc">
<h1 class="chapter">Table of Contents</h1>
<ol>
<li><a href="title.xhtml">The Monarch Butterfly Book</a></li>
</ol>
</nav>

Then, as a replacement to the guide section, add a landmarks section, which works very similarly:

<nav epub:type="landmarks">
<h1>Guide</h1>
<ol>
<li><a epub:type="ibooks:reader-start-page" href="title.xhtml">The Monarch Butterfly Book</a></li>
<li><a epub:type="cover" href="title.xhtml">Cover</a></li>
<li><a epub:type="bodymatter" href="milkweed.xhtml">First page</a></li>
</ol>
</nav>

Finally, declare the new toc.xhtml file in the OPF file, paying special attention to the properties attribute:

<item id="toc" href="toc.xhtml" media-type="application/xhtml+xml" properties="nav"/><!--new in 1.1-->

That's it for the OPF file.

Changes to the XHTML files

In each of the XHTML files, I had to change the meta tag where I declared the character set. It was:

<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

and it should be:

<meta charset="UTF-8"/>

I also had a few documents that somehow still had extraneous DOCTYPE elements. I got rid of those and made sure that each XHTML document started like this:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<html xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>

There were also a few places I had erroneously used character entities, things like © to show the © symbol. Now that I had the proper character set declaration, that was no longer necessary (or allowed). So I simply removed the character entities and replaced them with the characters themselves, typed in directly.

<p>Copyright ©2012 by Elizabeth Castro...

As far as content, I also fixed the error on page 24, which had the blinking arrows in the wrong place:



And put them where they go:



I also changed the Javascript so that the arrows would blink more slowly. People seem to have had difficulty finding the captions. It's actually a tricky problem. I want the photos to be displayed without distractions, but I want to offer clues. I haven't quite found the perfect solution yet.

Validating

Once of all of the changes were made, I used EpubCheck to make sure I had done it all correctly. I used the latest version: EpubCheck3RC.

Uploading the new file to the iBookstore

Finally, I uploaded it to Apple's iBookstore with iTunes Producer. When you make changes to a book that already exists, you only have to change the parts in iBooks Producer that are different, and it will only update those pieces of your package. So, I updated the description and then on the Assets page, I clicked the Choose button under Publication, and selected the new updated EPUB file. This screenshot is actually after I've done that. iTunes Producer doesn't give a lot of feedback.



And then I got the error I was suspecting:



I was expecting it because Apple says that you have to say what changed in a "Version_whats_new" XML file. I hadn't been able to find where that was.

It turns out I had downloaded the latest version of iTunes Producer, but I hadn't installed it. Once I did that, I was able to add the What's new information on the Book page:



Then I delivered the package again (no need to upload the book files again), and it went through without a hitch.

What I am most interested to see now is how it notifies me (and all of you who have purchased the book through the iBookstore) about the new changes. The new description went live almost immediately, but when I go to iTunes Connect, it tells me that the EPUB 3 version is under review.



And indeed, I don't see that little update icon that Tim Cook promised. Though I'm left with questions: When does iBooks check? Does versioning only work in iBooks 3? Do I have to open and close the app to force a check?



When I go to the Purchased section of the iBookstore, I also see that it shows that the book was already downloaded and I have no opportunity to update it. I assume that when the changes go live, this button will change.



If you haven't bought the book yet, you'll be able to tell if you have the new version by checking page 24 and clicking the info arrow to see where those arrows show up.

And I'll keep you posted about how long it takes to go live. It seems like a really important feature to me. I would have liked to add a note or bookmark to see if those are maintained, but fixed layout format doesn't allow them. I'll have to update one of my other books...

Writing EPUB 3 - Samples of fixed and flowing ebooks with Japanese text

I've finally managed to get the slides from my talk in Tokyo uploaded.

Writing EPUB 3 - Tokyo Ebook Expo from liz_castro

My talk was titled “Writing EPUB 3”, and was particularly Japanese-language and code-centric. Before June, I had never worked with Japanese at all. And I don't read, write, or speak Japanese. But since one of the major new features of EPUB 3 is its support for Asian languages—and vertical writing and right to left page progression in particular—, I decided I needed to create examples that reflected these improvements.

Here's one completely basic thing I learned: Japanese books can either be laid out with horizontal text and left-to-right page progression (like English) OR with vertical writing and right-to-left page progression. For print books, the former are bound on the left, while the latter are bound on the right. When you're creating ebooks, you have to define the page-progression for each type, that is, when I swipe toward the left, am I going back or forward in the book? EPUB 3 makes this possible.

For my flowing book, I used text from Wikipedia (about my beloved Monarch butterflies), with my own photographs. I added a few Japanese typographic effects, including

• tate-chu-yoko - displaying a few non-Japanese characters, like a number, vertically, instead of on its side as longer strings of non-Japanese characters are generally shown

* kenten - adding sesame seed characters next to words for emphasis



You can also add Ruby characters (tiny Japanese characters placed next to regular words as extra explanation) and other typographic features.

You can download my flowing EPUB 3 example of vertical Japanese text and right-to-left progression here (and note that this is a sample, and not production quality work... it's meant to show possibilities!)

My second example is a short (and silly) manga book in fixed layout format with a Read Aloud media overlay.



Much thanks to Toshiaki Koike of Voyager Japan for recording one of the voices in the audio, and for helping me write out the words that I was learning from my very rudimentary Japanese lessons. The lovely illustrations were created by Andreu Cabré.

It is a valid EPUB 3 file, but I added the Apple .com file so that it would also work in iBooks. Note that although the media overlay works mostly well in iBooks, the book progresses from left to right when it should go from right to left. The page progression works properly in the Kobo app on the iPad, but the media overlay makes the app crash. I've heard that Kobo doesn't like multiple mp3 files, but haven't had a chance to see if that's really the problem. And the page progression also works in Readium, but Readium doesn't yet support media overlays in fixed layout books. We're getting there, but we're not there yet!

Here's how it works in iBooks:



You can download the EPUB 3, Fixed Layout, Media Overlay, with right-to-left progression and Japanese vertical writing here.