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Helpful answers
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Jul 19, 2015 6:27 PM in response to Frank Lowneyby Tom Gewecke,★HelpfulTo my knowledge Apple has only published one piece of information about this new feature, namely
About ePubs created with iBooks Author - Apple Support
I suspect that the published results of experiments by yourself and others will be a better source of info for authors than anything Apple is likely to provide.
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Jul 20, 2015 10:23 AM in response to Tom Geweckeby Frank Lowney,It was helpful to see Apple asserting ePub 3 compatibility with the further assertion that ePub 3 eReaders other than iBooks should be able to render ePubs created with iBooks Author in some fashion. My limited testing indicates that this is partially true. Using Readium (what IPDF says is the benchmark to use), I obtained mixed results. text, singular static images and video (presumably audio too) worked fine. The Image Gallery widget was rendered as a sequence of inline images with captions which is congruent with Apple's claim that rendering will be successful but may appear differently. I tried to use the Bookry Calculator widget but this widget was not functional in Readium as it was in iBooks.
I suppose that we can look forward to seeing the results of BISG testing of the latest versions of the iBooks.app or become evaluators ourselves. That would cover the eReader aspect of this question.
The ePub creator app aspect will be a bit more difficult. I suspect that you are correct in thinking that we're on our own here. It's a "black box" problem that will yield answers only with a great deal of data collection, coordination and discussion. I do hope that someone will pick up this challenge and establish a web site that facilitates this kind of work.