Re: [school-discuss] Digital textbooks

[Evan Leibovitch <evan@xxxxxxxxx>]

Les R wrote:
> Hi Evan,
>
> A few questions about epub:
>
> a) What kind of authoring environments are available?
>   
In the proprietary world, Adobe InDesign reportedly produces good epub
but may be short on workflow tools.

But right now the choice of FOSS epub-specific tools is pretty sparse,
and the ones that exist are fairly ... raw. As I mentioned in another
mail, my currently most-used tool is the  Quanta XML-development
environment. But that's a very powerful, general purpose tool that's not
really acceptable IMO for inflicting on authors or editors.

> b) What kind of media embedding (if any) and linking does it support?
>   
Linking is supported, internally and (assuming the reader has Internet
access) externally.
Media embedding is supported, but the current generation of readers are
spotty and inconsistent in support beyond static JPGs.
There are many reading systems (both self-contained readers such as the
Sony and software such as Stanza or Adobe Digital Editions) and there's
a LOT of variance in how they display the same content.

This is indeed really bleeding edge. The virtual ink is barely dry on
the latest versions of the standards.

> c) Can it be used as part of a 'single source, multiple output
> formats' where we have a single source code for documents, but can
> have multiple output (object) formats .... pdf, html,  epub?
>   
Possibly, since ePub is XML-based. But its subset of XHTML doesn't allow
for some of the fine-grained richer formatting options that you might
want when going to print or if you want the very specific design control
over output offered by PDFs. Epub serves a different purpose by being
able to  dynamically reformat to optimize to the display device (PC,
dedicated ebook reader, netbook, smartphone, text-to-speech system, etc.).

Right now I'm thinking that heavily-templated ODF might be better for
some as a single source document, leaving epub as more of a distribution
system than a base format. But that opinion may change as I get deeper
into this. I'm still learning daily about the format and its potential.

- Evan