Case Study
Enhanced eBook Features
Enhanced eBooks go beyond the simple layouts of most ebooks to offer more complex formatting, illustration, and rich media such as video, audio and program-like interactions. As we’ve just seen, updates to the EPUB and Kindle formats — EPUB3 and Kindle KF8 — provide the advanced features needed for enhanced ebooks. A new breed of e-reading devices and apps is emerging to support these new versions.
We’ll take a brief look at some of the more important formats being used today to produce enhanced ebooks in this changing landscape.
• PDF (Portable Document Format)
• Apps
• Fixed layout ebooks
• Web app
And we’ll look at two popular tools for producing enhanced ebooks
• Adobe Digital Publishing Suite
• Apple iBooks Author
These tools and formats are just a small selection of the many options to produce enhanced digital publications. Each of these has solid backing and supporters among the publishing community but this is a field where we’re still some way from having a widely-adopted standard.