Interactive books

What’s the best way of producing an interactive language learning book? The book is aimed at retired people in Denmark. All you hear these days is iPad but I don’t think the iPad has penetrated this sector so widely that we should be looking at an exclusively iPad solution. As I investigated the challenge it soon became clear that the solution is far from obvious.  Inkling’s Habitat is one of the best but available only to bona fide publishers which leaves me with the very restricted iBooks Author option, possible only because I happen to have the magic combination of Macbook and iPad in the house which makes this feasible.

What do I want?
Perhaps my wish list is impossible but these are the features I would like:

• A digital book which can be printed in hard copy.
• Includes audio
• Can be accessed on a PC/Mac, iPad and smartphone
• Includes self-assessing quizzes
• Mouseover translation of single words to Danish

It would also be good if they included the possibility of a little social interaction.

Right from the start there is a tension between demanding digital interactivity and hard copy options as a highly interactive digital product will be impossible to print out. But the paper requirement is there because the target market is likely to demand it.

So what are the options?
E-books My first impulse was to try out e-book makers:

1. PDF
2. Issu
3. Epubbud
4. iBooks Author
5. Papertrell

Few people seem to realize that pdfs have the option of embedding audio and mouse-overs. It is also possible to include self-correcting quizzes. But a pdf will always look like a pdf so they do not look very attractive on the screen. This is where tools such as Issu come in as it’s true that they make pdfs look extremely attractive. But these magazine showcase tools include very little in the way of interactivity. The audio files do not follow for example when I upload an interactive pdf to Issu.

I was excited by the possibilities offered by epubbud as it seemed to offer many options for interactivity as well as outputting to all the interfaces on my list. However having tried to use it for a sample chapter I find it very time-consuming and awkward. I thought I was introducing page breaks for example and when I looked at the result I discovered that each page had been turned into a chapter and that they were all out of order.

iBooks Author produces a beautiful and interactive product but it is a one device solution which makes it very inaccessible to my target market. Also in order to produce iBooks with Author you need a Mac to do the work and an iPad on which to view the results; a very expensive and uncommon set-up. The advantages of iBooks Author is that it easily produces beautiful looking results although I have a feeling that the default layout will become instantly recognizable in a very little while which means that professional publishers will have to find a different look. Adding audio and video is relatively straightforward although one has to be careful about the amount since there is an overall 2Gb limit for each publication. More problematic is adding other types of interactivity. Being in the language learning field I would for example find it useful to have an audio recording widget every so often. But I don’t know if this is technically possible. In any other medium I would just embed a Vocaroo widget. It looks as though it is possible to make custom code but I don’t have the skills for that and would need to find ready made snippets of dashcode.

The Author features I like include:

• Attractive layout
• Inclusion of audio and video
• Easy to include a glossary/index/dictionary
• Ability for users to add personal notes, bookmark and highlight

The Author features I dislike are the limited distribution possibilities. It’s iPad/iPhone or nothing. If we were a public education institution we could create a course in iTunesU which brings me to the second main option.

E-learning
Then it hit me that a great deal of the functionality I’m looking for is already available in the e-learning sector. The advantage here would be a tried and tested technology. One of the most successful seems to be Articulate, especially now with its sophisticated Storyline and amongst the free ones the following look most promising:

1. Exe
2. Courselab
3. Xerte
4. Udutu

One thing these e-learning products lack is the possibility of turning the text part of the product into a saleable print version. Given the target market this is very important. We also want the experience to feel more like a book than a course so we don’t want all the paraphernalia of registration and logging on every time it is used.

Apps
My final thought was that I should be looking at mobile apps as a possibility for distributing the course material because whether the final product is called an app or an ebook, it all ends up being read through the medium of an app such as a Kindle or iBooks.  A major emerging trend is the use of html5 instead of Flash which Apple rejects. So far the html5 apps which I’ve seen are aimed squarely at professional, high volume producers rather than the amateur. They include Press and 3dissue.

Some winners?
A great option seems to be Habitat, the publishing arm of Inkling and one of the emerging html5 players. Habitat seems to have all the desired interactivity including the possibility of some limited social interaction through page notes. One of Habitat’s great strengths is that it is made both for iPad and the web. The problem here is that Habitat is not yet generally available plus it is one of those aimed currently at professional publishers rather than the small scale one-off type of project.

But for the small-scale publisher the current best option seems to be Papertrell. This is a fast evolving beta tool whose main attraction lies in the way in which it produces interactive, content-based apps which are app store ready. You can see what the app will look like on the current range of major platforms which includes iPad, iPhone, Android, Windows and Kindle Fire, as you work. Their library of ready made backgrounds and styles means that you are producing professional looking products from day one and the pricing is attractive to small players who want to dip their toes in the water. I have also found their support staff to be exceedingly helpful.

My research into the world of epublishing shows me that there probably won’t be any free options, if only because of the barrier created by getting products accepted by the different app stores. I also get the impression that what is driving this is not the software innovators but the publishers who see interactive content as the future, so the best tools will probably end up being produced by publishers that are aiming for a profitable catalogue of content which is why some of them target the professional end of the market. A big driver in the near future will surely be text books for schools and higher education which means this is potentially a huge and profitable market.

This is an extremely fast-changing sector and it isn’t certain that the tools I mention in this piece will remain the big players in the field but I need a starting point and for the present, Papertrell seems to be the best option for an experimenter like me.