If you think that you are too small to make a difference,
try going to bed with a mosquito in your room!

Adding just one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for an 8 character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries

The following images show the issue in a test EBook generated initially in InDesign. All the items in the first (frontis) page should be centered, but aren’t. However the titles in each chapter (added using exactly the same styles!) appear fine.

To further confuse, testing the identical book in Adobe Digital Editions shows the required formatting. So in the immortal words of developers everywhere, what the?
It turns out the problem is not in the CSS, or even in the ePUB. But with iBooks. And I thank the gurus at Pigs, Gourds and Wikis for pointing me in the right direction. The solution is “Apple simple”, meaning its easy/obvious once you’ve been told where to look. But impossible to fathom before then.
Turns out iBooks has an “override” setting for justifying text. And this for some reason messes with my text-align:center. settings. The value can be changed within the Settings application. To get the centred text to appear as expected I needed to turn full justification off.
To demonstrate, following are the same pages from the start of the article, but now with the setting changed. Nothing was modified in the ePUB itself, only the iBooks configuration.

All is right with the world.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Discovered in 1001 Rules for My Unborn Son. It comes in as #432.

IBooks app updated to support audio and video content

To date my EBook focus has been on the iPad platform, since that’s the tool we’re evaluating for business reference/learning. The first books were plain text and images, and handmade.

Initial attempts to add richer content via CSS and Javascript had mixed results (and will publish those once complete). But until now it was quite clear that audio and video were out, at least without some major hackery. So let’s hope this is good news….

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Interesting take on the need to not be too blinded by the status quo when looking to be innovative (although read Luke Hohmann’s clarification that this not should be taken to mean “ignore your customers”). More to get beyond what the customer says they want (framed in what they’re used to, or aware of) to what the real need is.

However, particularly in the corporate world, you may not want to make your book publically available. So how do you get all the benefits of an eBook on the iPad (and/or the excuse to buy an iPad for business use) but without releasing your internal documents to the world? After some research, trial and error, the process is really quite simple.

To have your very own library on your very own iPad just three steps are required:

1. create a valid eBook
2. drag that book into iTunes, and
3. synchronise your iPad with your updated iTunes library.

Your personal eBook will then be available on your iPad, right there alongside, and indistinguishable in quality, your John Grisham collection. Or your Alice in Wonderland collection if still stuck in a region – like here in Australia – with no functioning iBooks store.

Step 1. Create a valid eBook

While this may appear daunting it’s really straightforward once you realise a few simple truths.

• iBooks supports eBooks produced in the standard ePub format (read more on Wikipedia)
• an ePub book is simple a zipped folder with a different extension (changes .zip to .epub)
• within your eBook your content must be included as XHTML files, one file per chapter
• accompanying your content are a variety of XML files that define the structure and order of your content

And that’s it. You don’t need anything more complicated than a text editor and a folder zipping tool. It’s so simple I strongly recommend you (at least the first time) build one manually. It’ll give you a much better understanding of how it all comes together, and what options you have in defining and manipulating your content.

There are several tutorials online to help guide you through the process to build an eBook.  I recommend you follow this one from jedisaber. Download the sample file provided and follow the steps.

If your experience is the same as mine, most of the issues you’ll face when generating your first book will be in producing valid XHTML content. As such it’s recommended you build and validate this first. Issues I had included:

• incorrect nesting of tags
• not closing tags (particularly the img and br items)
• missing attributes (particularly alt on all my images)

However use a decent XHTML validator (if not using Safari – which tests automagically – go for the master and use the one from W3C) and you’ll get through them.

Outside the XHTML the only other issue was in ensuring all the content files were encoded correctly:

On the Mac I was using BBEdit. It gives you an option in the Edit Window to set the encoding: pick UTF-8. Note I also picked Windows CRLF because I was using a PC to package the book, more on that later.

On the PC I was using Notepad to edit. It allows you to set the encoding when saving. Again, choose UTF-8.

 
Once all your content is complete and valid, you can then compile your book in the folder you’ll then zip and rename to become the finished ePub. Follow the instructions (and sample) from jedisaber:

1. ignore mimetype and META-INF (content does not need to change from one book to the next)
2. load your valid content into OPS folder, documents and images (use subdirectory for your images if you set the URLs in your content to match)
3. edit content.opf (XML file) to list all your content (and only your content – remove references to sample files not used). Make sure the URLs are correct, particularly if using subdirectories in OPS to organise your content
4. edit toc.ncx (XML file) to list your content in the order to be navigated and with the section/chapter titles as you want them to be shown
5. ZIP the folder
6. Rename the folder from a .ZIP extension to a .ePUB extension

Be careful generating the ZIP version on a Mac using the built in compression tool. Not only does this incorporate all the hidden OSX files (DS_Store, etc) it also seems to put an extra folder layer in. I was only able to generate the correctly formatted ZIP file using Winzip on a PC.  This also allowed me to set the compression for the mimetype file to 0% as requested.

Note I managed to resolve the “extra folder” issue in OSX. Trick is not to choose your eBook folder to compress. Instead select the contents of that folder (should be three things: mimetype and META-INF and OEBPS folders) and compress them. You’ll get an Archive.Zip file you can then rename. This doesn’t resolve the potential issue with hidden files but I’ve not had any issues with ePUBs built this way since.

I then suggest you validate the eBook prior to the move into iTunes. Use the online threepress tool – it’s free. It may identify a few items you’ll need to return to your source to resolve. Just make the edits, rebuild/rename the ZIP and try again.

With that tool the only error I was not able to get rid of concerned the length of the first filename. I’m guessing this is because the requirement is for mimetype to be the first file in the ZIP file but I could not find any way to enforce this. However even with this error I did not get any issues with the subsequent steps so if you get this error, ignore it like I did.

If the book validates, then also consider testing it in a reader outside of iTunes. I used the bookworm from O’Reilly. Alternatively try Adobe Digital Editions, a free download so you can test your books without a web connection.

Step 2. Drag into iTunes

Simply open iTunes, select your Books folder, and drag your .epub file into the window. If all works well you should see your book listed, with its cover appearing in all its glory.

Note you cannot open/view/test the book from here. That only happens when you get it onto the iPad.

Step 3. Synchronise and launch on your iPad

When you sync your iPad just ensure its set to include all new eBooks. Your file will then get copied across and be ready for use. Congratulations!

Next steps

Using XHTML it’s straightforward to include text and images in your content. So feel free to improve on your content’s richness. Also consider adding a stylesheet (include in your content.opf file, as well as referenced in your XHTML) to further enhance the presentation.

You can easily add a nicer title/cover page so your book looks better on the shelf. Either build in XHTML or just create as a nice image and include.

From this foundation, the next step for me is to see if possible to include some richer media in the book. For example a video or audio snippet. We’ll see how that goes….

Resources

• ePub description: htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB
• Tutorial on building an eBook: http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/tutorial.asp
• Sample/Template ePub project: http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/books/sample.epub
• Online XHTML validator: http://validator.w3.org
• Online ePub validator: http://www.threepress.org/document/epub-validate/
• ePub viewers: http://bookworm.oreilly.com (online, registration required), or Adobe Digital Editions (download, registration required)

Note: All the online tools listed here require you to upload your content to their servers. Be mindful of how secure you want/need your content to remain before using any of these tools.

Once I stopped laughing I was curious about the tool used. The good news is the tool is great, fast, and free (ish).  It’s called State.

State works by simple animating chosen characters to reflect a written script that you enter.  It does the text-to-speech conversion for you.  Simple and effective approach.  But then what makes it even better is the ability to add gestures, facial expressions, camera moves, sound effects, etc through your script.  The beauty of this approach is you bang your words in and get the first draft almost as fast as you can type.  Then it’s up to you how much you gloss it up afterwards.  My first pass at a 1 minute teaser video for an internal newsletter took 20 mins (and that included learning how to use the tool).  Spicing it up added an hour.  And that was that.

Two versions: online or download exe
You can use State online or download the executable (Windows only).  Which to choose?

• downloaded version only gives you a single scene and single character when installed.  After that it connects you to an online marketplace where you can purchase additional characters, scenes, voices, at  costs from USD $1 – $15 (July 2010).  For a conversation style you can download Sarah Palin and Larry King for free, which explains why they ended up in my first film.
• online version gives you a lot more characters and scenes to choose from (although nothing with more than 2 characters).  But it only allows you to publish online (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter).  The downloadable version gives you additional options to export as MPG, MOV or AVI video files. 
• even with the downloaded version you need to be online when working as it requires you to create and register into an account (this is what determines what bonus features you have).  To work offline what I needed to do was login while online, and then not logout/close-down when moving to offline time.
• the online version was reporting serious delays in previewing content, due to high usage.  Not such a long wait with own copy.

Mainly for the ability to work offline I went for the downloaded version.  Worked fine once I got past the online-to-register issue.

Conclusion

State is a great tool if looking for something very quirky and engaging for some brief communication or announcement.  It will quickly get stale if overused.  So have fun with it now.

A three-year old is not half a six-year old.

From Justin Owings:

Thanks to Google, we can instantly seek out support for the most bizarre idea imaginable. If our initial search fails to turn up the results we want, we don’t give it a second thought, rather we just try out a different query and search again.