Tuesday, July 27, 2010

We continue our story of how a typical faculty person might create ePub documents with a more complex example. The screencast below will show and tell you how to create an ePub document with a video in it. Other media possibilities include static images and audio files.
Our example uses the poem "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley (1849-1903). Not only do we have the text of the poem to share with students but we also have a video of the actor Sir Alan Bates reciting it. There is only one chapter in this example but there could just as well be any number of chapters, each with media and text.




You may want to download this ePub-based eBook, "side load" it into the iTunes application and synch to a device running the iBooks application (iPad, iPhone or iPod touch). If you find an eReader other than iBooks that will display this eBook properly, please let me know.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Following up on my last post, I wanted to talk about how a typical faculty person might quickly and easily create an ePub-based eBook just by selecting text and invoking an automated process on their desktop or laptop computer if that faculty person is fortunate enough to have a modern Macintosh computer.
I also wanted to show rather than describe how easy this can be so here's my first video screencast for this blog. I hope that each frame is worth 10,000 words to you.




You may want to download this ePub-based eBook, "side load" it into the iTunes application and synch to a device running the iBooks application (iPad, iPhone or iPod touch).

For the next episode, I'll try to show how a more complex eBook project would be done using this same Automator service so stay tuned.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Now that the iBooks application is available on the iPhone and iPod touch under iOS4 as well as on the iPad, ePub has just become that much more important. Just as it did with RSS, Apple is finding and implementing ways to extend that standard. Including MPEG-4 audio and video in the text of an ePub document is a recent example. To be sure, these ePub documents won't play on very many devices other than iPad, iPhone and iPod touch via the iBooks application. At least not yet.

The technique employed by Apple is a straightforward one. Using the HTML 5 audio and video tags, these new elements appear and play as the following screen shot images illustrate. The first example involves adding audio to Lewis Carroll's classic "Alice in Wonderland" which is now in the public domain. Here, we see the table of contents: