EPUB3 Multimedia Features
A Lighting Overview

Adam Obeng
27th July 2011

Creative Commons Licence

EPUB3 Multimedia Features: A Lighting Overview by Adam Obeng is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

EPUB: In theory

International Digital Publishing Forum

Free and open
Re-flowable (word wrap) and re-sizable text
Inline raster and vector images
Embedded metadata
DRM support
CSS styling
Support for alternative renditions in the same file
Use of out-of-line and inline XML islands to extend the functionality of EPUB

EPUB: In practice

META-INF/container.xml
OEBPS/content.opf
*.html
Other web-like stuff

Fixed layout: not actually an EPUB3 feature

com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml

CSS:

	body {
width: 1200px;
height: 1700px;
	}

XHTML:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=1200, height=1700"/>

Other stuff

Images

Pretty basic HTML

<img src="image.jpg" alt="Alternate text"/ >

CSS to make images full-page (or not)

Video

					<video src="video.mp4" width="480" height="320"
					 controls="controls"/ >

Scripted control is possible (but to be avoided)
Other HTML5/CSS3 features?

Media Overlay

SMIL file synchronises audio and video

					<par id="audio-0">
						<text src="page1.html#l_1_1"/> 
						<audio src="beowulf.wav" clipBegin="3s" clipEnd="10s"/>
					</par>

A couple of other declartions in manifest
Optional CSS
Generation is tedious

Javascript

In theory, anything that can be done on a web page
In practice, it's still a book

Useful resources

http://idpf.org/epub/30/spec/epub30-contentdocs.html The EPUB 3.0 specification
http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/, Liz Castro's Blog
http://groups.google.com/group/epub-working-group, The EPUB Working Group

These slides...

Available now at adamobeng.com/dhox