From eBooks to enhanced eBooks

In the course of the last decade, we have moved from print books, now called pBooks by some, to the growing presence of eBooks.

In parallel, screens that used to be used exclusively for display have become responsive and include an ever growing number of touch screens that enable the user to interact directly with what appears on the screen.

This is called evolution and, unlike human or animal evolution, it happens at light speed and we’d better keep up with it not to become a dinosaur  that no-one will ever read, only due to the lack of access to our books through the new technologies

 What are enhanced eBooks?

Enhanced eBooks are, surprise, surprise, eBooks that have been enhanced. There are currently a few ways to enhance eBooks. The most basic one being creating links from the index direct to the subject matter described in the index, a very popular item in non-fiction eBooks. For fiction eBooks, enhanced eBook means eBook containing soundtracks, art and animation aimed at setting the mood of the chapter, or other addition enabling the reader to step behind the scenes, view the book in landscape mode or see video interviews of the author or author’s notes.

Then comes the ever growing number of apps for children books that enable children to interact with the illustration through the touch screen and bring the book alive.

So, how does one create an enhanced eBook?

During the coming weeks, we will explore the following options

Multi-Platform, basic eBooks

Picture books + motion

Template based apps

Media Mixers

Today, we just have a quick reminder of how to create a non-enhanced eBook, there are a number of articles on that subject on this blog, under the section Formatting an eBook  for more information on that topic.

Multi-Platform, basic eBooks

One of the main problem aspiring authors face is to format their books for all the different platforms now available on the market. Luckily, the Web is a very generous place and here are some programs available for free that require only one time encoding and then converts the book to various formats with a single click. Here is a non-exhaustive sample of some such free programs

Pandamian

Converts to .epub, .mobi, .pdf or plain text

Pressbook and Leanpub

There are many more such programs, but one is quite enough for converting an eBook into the various formats and these three are good.

Next week, we will take a closer look at picture books.