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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.

Posted on May 11, 2012 1:34 AM

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4 replies

May 11, 2012 1:56 PM in response to K T

Thanks for that. Delivering an app of this size appears to be more effort than I'm willing to make, and it doesn't really solve the cross-platform problem, other than for the iPhone. (And using ePub from Pages would be easier than an app to get the book onto the iPhone.)


I considered the website option too, but the lack of DRM is a serious issue for me.


It looks like I'll just have to wait until other platforms catch up…


Michi.

May 11, 2012 11:11 PM in response to soulhill

soulhill wrote:


If your book is mostly video, have you considered DVD, Blu-Ray or the iTunes Video store?

Thanks for the suggestion! No, I haven't considered the video store, mainly because, besides over two hours of video, there are also nearly 28,000 words of text, plus over 120 photos and diagrams. I don't think there is a sensible way to handle this as an iTunes video? (If there is, I'd be keen to learn!)


The DVD and Blu-Ray path did occur to me, but now I'm getting into distribution and shipping issues, which unfortunately, for a specialist title such as mine, are not really feasible. That's why I ended up publishing with iBooks Author in the iBookstore in the first place: it's an ecosystem perfect for micro-publishing titles that sell a few hundred or may a thousand copies at best, and it's perfect for this mixed-media kind of publishing.


Michi.

ePub with video for platforms other than iPad?

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