Video in Kindle books, thanks to EPUB3

Yesterday, I wrote about how you can call external audio/video files in an EPUB3 document. This works brilliantly in iBooks and Readium, but so far, nowhere else. What happens when it doesn't work is actually pretty interesting. According to the spec, you can add a fallback message, and indeed a fallback photo or link. In this case, I've used the poster image as a fallback image.

<p>Does everyone have their own cat videos? I sure do. Here are Nighty and a very small Momo playing the box game.</p>
    <video controls="controls" poster="image/poster.jpg" width="384" height="276">
    <source src="http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/examples/catbox2.mp4" />
    <source src="http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/examples/catbox2.wvm" />
    <p><a href="http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/examples/catbox.mp4"><img id="poster" width="384" height="276" src="image/poster.jpg" alt="poster" /> Click to play the video</a> and then return to read the rest of the book. </p>
    </video>


The only problem is that Adobe Digital Editions is the only EPUB ereader that properly displays the fallback message.



But it's nice. If you click the link, your default browser opens, and the video plays.

Unfortunately, if you open the EPUB file on the NOOK, or in Kobo (even the Kobo for iOS app), or even if you open it in iBooks without internet access—and thus the video cannot be displayed—you get varying things—sometimes the poster image, sometimes controls but no video—but no fallback content.

Fallback leads to video for Kindle books

But what about Kindle? Suppose you take that EPUB3 file, and pass it through KDP, or Kindle Previewer, or KindleGen, which all do the same thing—convert an EPUB file to KF8/mobi. And yes, they work on EPUB3 files as well as EPUB2 files. Next, open that converted mobi file in a Kindle Fire.

The fallback text, photo, and link appear, and better yet, when you click the link, Kindle Fire sends you to the browser, and plays the video. When you're done, the back arrows take you back to the book.



If that's not enough, stick it on Dropbox, and open your Dropbox app on an iPad. Once it's been copied, click the Open in another application arrow (upper right corner) and choose Kindle for iOS. Again, the fallback text, photo, and link appear, and when you click them, the video plays. It's true that you get an error message, but I'm guessing there's a way to get around that, but regardless, the video plays anyway. As if it were in a special window inside the Kindle iOS app. And when you've finished watching the video, click Done, and you go right back to the book.




So let's sum up:

1. So far, you can only play an embedded video right on a page in an ebook in iBooks and NOOK. But B&N won't let self- and indie publishers add such books to Pub It!.

2. You can play external video files right on a page in an ebook only in iBooks.

3. The fallback text doesn't appear in NOOK or Kobo.

4. The fallback text does appear in ADE and—if you convert the EPUB3 file to KF8/mobi—it also appears in Kindle Fire and Kindle for iOS (perhaps other Kindles too?), and all of these let you play the fallback video in an external browser.

5. An added caveat: I haven't uploaded a book to KDP with a link to external video. I can't guarantee that such a thing is permitted.

6. This opens up a lot of possibilities.

You can download the mobi file here. And if you liked this post, consider subscribing to my blog so I have time to write more!

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.

What I learned in Japan about EPUB 3, Rakuten, Kobo, Kodansha, and Japanese e-publishing in general

Here are some of my notes from the IDPF's first conference in Asia, specifically in Tokyo, Japan. The topic was EPUB 3, and it was co-sponsored by Voyager Japan. It was held as part of the larger 16th Tokyo Ebook Expo, in Tokyo Big Sight, a huge complex at the edge of the harbor.

NB: I don't speak Japanese, so not only are the quotes pretty rough, but they are quotations of how the interpreter translated what the speakers were saying. And it was all going by pretty quickly. Corrections welcome.

The opening presentation featured Hiroshi Mikitani, the head of Rakuten, the Japanese online retailing giant that just bought Kobo; Yoshinobu Noma, from Kodansha, one of Japan's largest publishers, and Bill McCoy, head of IDPF. with Takehiko Ogi, CEO Maruzen Chi Holdings, as the moderator.


Photo courtesy of Hagino-san, president of Voyager Japan

A few points stuck out for me. First and foremost, the Rakuten CEO stated that all their Japanese content would be in EPUB 3. He said they chose the open standard so they can compete not on format but on ease of use of their reade, that EPUB3 allows content to be viewed on all sorts of different devices. He talked about localized service on a globalized platform. Second, he stressed his desire to spread Japanese culture abroad, as well as to encourage reading in kids all over the world. Their initial target is to have 1,000,000 Japanese books in EPUB 3 format, and then add another half million, so you can get "any" book in Japanese as an ebook.

When asked how Rakuten was different from other players, and how the Japanese market was unique, Mikitani answered that they want to take advantage of the existing framework, including bookstores, of which there are 4x as many in Japan than in Europe or US.

The second panelist, Yoshinobu Noma, from Kodansha, said domination from one company was not good, and was encouraged by Rakuten's entry into the market. He mentioned that there are 70 million Rakuten club members with "points", and that the low price of the new Kobo Touch in Japan ($99) would help Rakuten and Kobo device gain foothold. He was concerned that fewer competitors keep books from coming to market. More publishers mean more freedom of expression, freedom to publish.

Then Bill McCoy (Executive Director of IDPF) added that the IDPF and open standards pave the way for the fusion of digital books: like manga is a fusion between comics and books, making a bigger world for all of us.

Mikitani then said "I am nationalist and as Japanese company, I want to make an impact in the global industry, and I want to export that overseas, not just manga, expand Japanese culture. Unless we have a device, [like Kobo], we cannot compete with overseas competitor: so there's a philosophical part plus a business part."

When asked if it was about books, he answered, "Kids are not reading, I'm not criticizing consoles, but this is a crisis because kids are not reading, and that affects the intellectual level. I think back to books I read in the past. In Brazil, there is no consumption tax on books, in EU, there is a lower tax. As a nation, we need to figure out how to expand book business.

The moderator immediately asked about Rakuten's servers, and it turns out they're all in Canada, which has some tax ramifications: Mikitani replied that "we must comply with the law, but we have servers in Canada for logistics… but that means no tax in Canada, 3% in EU and 0 in Japan."

[A quick internet search reveals that there is a 5% consumption tax in Japan, that will rise to 15% by the end of the year. It is not currently levied on electronic products purchased abroad, and thus by selling from Canada, Rakuten would not have to charge the tax.]

Mikitani played down color tablet ereaders because of weight and price [which I think are important points]. He said 70% of users in US have both tablet and e-ink. [Not sure where this number comes from.]

Then Noma-san spoke about government subsidized initiative to convert 60,000 books [to epub3 format??] but stressed idea that paper and digital is not zero-sum, that one can build on and benefit from the other.

He said that Japanese government has said that all textbooks must be electronic by 2020 and that that will be the tipping point for ebooks.

Question: EPUB 3 content is not widespread, how do you position it?

Bill: Japan has chance to leapfrog the splintering of EPUB 2. Mikitani: we have to have one Japanese standard and one global standard. Noma-san (Kodansha) is member of IDPF and also working on EPUB 3.

Noma-san continued on to explain concept of #GAFMA (or Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple), and said that they had to find a way to deal with that group. "As partner, we can work with them, but in US, there is competition. How can *we* compete with them? EU companies say Japanese companies exist that can compete, and they asked how we work with them, and we talked about how to compete healthily against each other. From EU perspective, they welcomed Rakuten's acquisition of Kobo. In short, GAFMA can be competitor or partner.

Question: Will Rakuten buy publishers? Bookstores? Mikitani: "I think we should let experts do what they do best, we have no plans to buy publishers or bookstores, but would like to strengthen alliance with bookstores [and indeed I saw Kobo being demo-ed in Bunkyo-do the next day.]

Question: What about writers? Are they thinking of ebooks?

Noma-san: Some are against, but gradually this will change. We are trying to do simultaneous paper, ebook, so get contract from author for both is way to go.

Question: Can Japanese culture be exported with ebooks?

Noma-san: "Already with manga, in Taiwan we have distribution company going to mainland China eventually, Japanese flavor needs to be added to Kobo in order to go global"

Mikitani: "I was amazed at how much manga was in FNAC in Paris, but in suburban stores, there's no shelfspace. So, selling ebooks online, where there is infinite shelfspace enables that possibility. This is great opportunity to export Japanese literature."

Question: Talk about how passionate you are about ebook industry.

Mikitani: This is going to be the initial year for ebooks themselves, this is an opportunity for ebook industry to expand overseas, with Kobo, and Kodansha, we'd like to support your business.

Noma-san: I make many speeches on big trends, but sometimes people misunderstand me. In Japanese market, unless we win in print, we won't win in digital. We have to win in print, now we will see a transformation, this is the chance to go digital. We have to create good content.

Bill: Digital books can be complimentary to print, but we don't yet know what digital books are, and can be. Publishers must become web publishers.

----------------

On the second day, after my and Markus Gylling's talks in the morning, Ren Ando gave another presentation on Kobo and Rakuten which I found interesting.

Here's a brief synopsis of what he said:

Rakuten is an online marketplace, travel, financial, banks, credit services, advertising, entertainment. They do 1 trillion yen of business per year (about 12 billion dollars). Kobo is 3 years old, with 9 million users in 190 countries, 17000 publishers, 2.4 million titles, sales partners in 7 countries. Joined Rakuten in 2012.

Partner model: authors and publishers => Kobo => distribute device through local partners

Kobo touch, to be available at the end of July. Make Japanese reading culture a part of the global culture. "Renaissance and revolution of the reading culture"

EPUB 3 for all Japanese books in the catalog

Why? A: An open ecosystems is better for global interoperability, publishers and authors can trust EPUB, rapid increase of number of titles, a reliable reading platform, fast circulation of EPUB based books, migration pain mitigation, other EPUB based services, authors, publishers

"We are at a tipping point in Japan"

Creators can create and there will be lots of channels for distributing content

Strategy:

1 EPUB migration assistance for publishers
Assistance on converstion process
EPUB 3 authoring guidelines

2 High fidelity to the Japanese publishers typography requirements
co-developed between Access and Kobo
Cross platform reading experience (Android, iOS, Mac OSX, Windows)

3 Rakuten viewer aligns with latest drafts of CSS writing modes and CSS text modules
Rakuten working with W3C and Unicode consortium on these drafts

"We don't want to compete on EPUB capabilities, but rather on ease of use"

4 For "renaissance of reading culture on global scale" Rakuten works with Access to share some part of our outcomes through Readium Initiative.

----------

Finally, this was my first trip to Japan. You can see my pictures here.

First look at EPUB3-supporting Kobo Touch ereader in Japan

Zen again (and what a place for it!) A friend asked me to pick up a copy of the Manga version of Math Girls, so we went to Bunkyo-do, a large bookstore in Tokyo. (It was remarkably packed with shoppers, and had lovely displays.) And lo and behold, the folks from Kobo/Rakuten were there demoing the new Kobo Touch with Japanese language support (aka EPUB 3). Here's what it looks like:



I haven't seen the Kobo Touch in the US, but I assume it's pretty similar: nice touch screen, customary padded back, Twitter and FB sharing, ability to select, highlight, and annotate, and in this version, look up words in a Japanese dictionary (although only in the flowing examples, not the manga, which still has static text). Most important: excellent support for vertical Japanese text.

I have a lot of notes I want to share about the IDPF EPUB 3 conference on Wednesday, but one of the interesting points was how the need for Japanese (and other non-Roman) language support may push more ebook publishers and retailers to move to EPUB 3. Rakuten/Kobo, for example, announced that all of its Japanese ebooks will be in EPUB 3 format.

Oh yeah, and it comes in four colors. (And costs 7990 yen, about $99.)

EPUB 3 has finally arrived

EPUB 3 support is remarkably good in Readium, Kobo for iOS and iBooks, and EPUB 3 files can be opened by NOOK and Kobo Vox, and converted by Kindle Previewer and KDP.

I am writing today from Tokyo where the IDPF kindly invited me to speak about EPUB 3 at the 16th Ebook Expo. At first, I was a bit nervous to go (OK, I’m still a little nervous) because although others have been talking about EPUB 3 for a while, I had been avoiding digging in too deeply. To be frank, there were only a few ereaders that supported EPUB 3 until just recently, and I was reluctant to spend time on something that wasn’t yet working in the main ereaders.

But as I worked on this presentation, which began with IDPF’s Digital Book portion of BEA in New York in June, and then developed into the talk I’m giving today in Tokyo, I realized that EPUB 3 is much closer to reality than most of us have realized.

I started by trying to unravel why the toc.ncx file is allowed in EPUB 3 while the nav.xhtml file is required. Why would you go to the trouble of adding the rather persnickety toc.ncx file if you have to create the nav.xhtml file anyway? Or, put another way, why would you create a toc.ncx file if your ereader supports EPUB 3 and thus the nav.xhtml file? The answer, of course, is to serve old ereaders that don’t support EPUB 3. But can they read EPUB 3 at all? To find out, I created a sample EPUB 3 file and then opened it up in all of my old ereaders, that presumably only support EPUB 2. Imagine my surprise, when every single one opened the EPUB 3 file without a complaint.

(I even tried uploading an EPUB 3 file to Kindle Direct Publishing. Again, no problem at all, it converted the EPUB 3 file to mobi and kf8 and they displayed just fine.)

This is exceptionally good news, as it means we can move forward with EPUB 3 without worrying that older readers won’t be able to open our files.

Of course, old ereaders won’t be able to take advantage of all of the new features that EPUB 3 provides. Indeed, that’s exactly why you might include the old toc.ncx file: since old ereaders don’t know what to do with the nav.xhtml file, the toc.ncx file is still necessary for them to generate a navigational TOC. Newer EPUB 3 readers will just ignore it.

But there’s more. As I discussed in an article a month or so ago, the IDPF published a new specification for Fixed Layout format in May. Readium, the EPUB 3 browser developed by the IDPF of course supports the newly published spec, as does iBooks (albeit unofficially). And thanks to a tip from Laura Brady, I downloaded the new version of Kobo for iOS, and saw that Kobo for iOS, too, supports the new IDPF EPUB 3 spec.

Perhaps not surprisingly—given Kobo’s recent acquisition by the Japanese company Rakuten—but very gratifyingly nonetheless, Kobo also has strong support for EPUB 3 based Japanese writing systems, both in flowing and fixed layout books.



But there’s still more. As I was developing an example for my talk today—a right-to-left, fixed layout, read aloud, Japanese language lesson*—I realized that EPUB 3's system for creating media-overlays (the mechanism for creating read aloud narration that syncs with text) is significantly different from Apple’s.

But when I tested my new book, using the official spec for EPUB 3 fixed layout and media overlays and Japanese writing, it worked brilliantly in Readium, Kobo, and iBooks, (with some minor caveats**) shown below in that order.







This is huge news. Readium’s support was obvious and necessary, Kobo’s was encouraging, but Apple’s support means that all of the iBooks-focused work can move towards EPUB 3, and the myriad of amazing possibilities that it affords, without having to worry about losing the iPad readers, where most of those features really shine.

I can only hope that Barnes & Noble, and of course Amazon, join the party soon.

I suspect neither is willing to give up the Japanese market, where EPUB 3 is the best answer for vertical writing systems. Support for fixed layout EPUB 3 and media-overlays is a natural extension.

Of course, as you know by now, I am an eternal standards optimist. Still, today’s news is brilliant and hopeful indeed. The IDPF is doing excellent work and the top ereader manufacturers are using it!

Last but not least, in the Tokyo metro today, I saw an ad for the new Kobo Touch, proudly displaying Vertical Japanese text (an EPUB 3 only feature), for 8990 Yen, or about $100. EPUB 3 really is here.



You can download my manga example here. There are lots more EPUB 3 examples on the Readium site.

--------
*Since I don’t speak or read Japanese, I got a lot of help from Wikipedia, Google Translate, Andreu Cabré (who also drew the illustrations for the manga example and is studying Japanese), and EPUB expert Toshiaki Koike, from Voyager Japan, who wrote out the Japanese words and then narrated the boy’s part. Yours truly plays the girl.

**Ah, the caveats. First, you still have to include the com file for Apple to recognize that a file is fixed layout. It seems kind of ridiculous to me, given that it already recognizes the official way for marking a fixed layout file (with the renditions prefix), but that’s where it stands so far. I was so impressed that iBooks understands the new Media-overlay code that I gave it a(nother) free ride on this account.

Next caveat: Although iBooks supports vertical writing and highlighted media overlays, it does not yet support right-to-left progression. You’ll notice that my manga example proceeds in the wrong direction (left to right) in iBooks. In flowing books, iBooks doesn’t know what to do with the second and subsequent pages of vertical text, and hides it altogether. That is a fatal flaw that I assume they’re working on.

Next caveat: Although Kobo has strong support for both vertical writing and right to left page progression, its support of media-overlays is rather spotty yet. At first I couldn't get the play button to appear at all, but after downloading Kobo again, the play button showed up, but now the read aloud crashes pretty regularly. I hear that Kobo doesn't like multiple audio files (which my EPUB has, and legally so), so that'll be my next try, but I didn't have time for this example.

Last but not least: Readium supports fixed layout, vertical text, rtl page progression, and media-overlays, including highlighting in flowing books, but I had to beg for a pre-release fork to see the highlighting in action in this fixed layout example. And it still doesn't quite highlight the words as I marked them, nor does it let me choose a highlight color. It should be updated soon.

Admittedly, we’re in the initial stages, but I really like the direction we’re headed, together, thanks to the IDPF and its members.