ePub with video for platforms other than iPad?
I have a book (created with iBooks Author) in the iBookstore. The core of the book is a little over two hours of video. Without the video, the book is only a shadow of itself.
A big problem for me is that, for my target audience, the iPad is something of a rarity. If I could publish on platforms other than iPad (PC, Mac, Android, Kindle, etc.), my potential audience would probably grow more than ten-fold.
I started looking at converting my book into plain ePub. Not a problem: Pages and like the like will do it with ease. I don't mind losing the interactive features such as galleries and animated diagrams. (These are nice, but not essential.)
After looking for a while, I found that the situation seems rather depressing. There are not many (hopefully free) eReaders out there. There are even fewer that can handle video inside an ePub. After a lot of browsing and reading blogs and the like, it seems that the iPad is pretty much the only device in existence that can (decently) handle video inside an ePub. Adobe Digital Editions appears to be limited to Flash video, which won't play on an iPad so, if I go with that, I have a book that, in one version, will work with Adobe Digital Editions and, in another version, will work with the iPad, but neither version will work with the other, and doubling the size of my book to include both Flash and MPEG video is prohibitive for me. (It would push the size of the book to nearly 3 GB.)
I'm looking for recommendations as to other micro-publishing platforms I could use to open up the target audience. I had a look at Google Books, which looks promising. It will publish ePub and even offers DRM. But I can't find a way to overcome the PC/Mac/iPad barrier right now.
And the Kindle Fire appears to be completely unable to play video inside an ePub. Even the Kindle Reader will display video inside an ePub only on iPhone and iPad, but nowhere else (not on a PC, not on a Mac, not on a Kindle Fire).
So, what I'm looking for is a way to target more platforms (given the video requirement).
Any suggestions from anyone on how to overcome this?
Thanks,
Michi.