Computer eBooks with Interactive Animations

From my perspective as a computer book author and reader, I think computer books (and some other technical books) could be good candidates for PDF ebooks that the readers might be happy to read on their computer. After all, if the book is about programming, for instance, I would be at my computer anyway, so it's hardly any trouble to open the PDF file and read while I try following the steps outlined in the book. This is where I think it might make sense to embed simple interactive animations showing code samples or illustrating some steps with an animated sequence of screenshots (here's a sample PDF with simple interactive animation). The reader could click a button to play the animation or pause. We could add voice narration as well, but, for computer books, I prefer simple animations with narrative text (the sound can be irritating). The ability to add animations is one feature that distinguishes ebooks from print books and may be a good selling point for the ebooks.

I am thinking of PDF as the mechanism for interactive ebooks with embedded animations because Adobe Acrobat 6 or later enables you to embed sound and movie files (in many formats such as WAV, MP3, QuickTime, Flash, and AVI) into PDF documents. Acrobat also supports JavaScript code, with which you can control the audio and video playing (for example, do such things as start, stop, and pause the animation when the user clicks a button or opens a specific page). You can even embed interactive 3D animation within a PDF file. The documents with embedded animations can be viewed in any viewer that supports Acrobat JavaScript—one good example is Adobe Reader 7, which is freely available for a wide variety of systems. All these features make PDF convenient for embedded interactive animations.

By the way, I keep mentioning PDF as a format for interactive ebooks only because PDF is widely used and I am used to PDF. Besides, with the recent announcement of Adobe's agrement to acquire Macromedia, perhaps we can expect improved integration of PDF and Macromedia Flash animations. Anyway, my main point is that addition of interactive animation could be a useful feature in ebooks that cover computers and technology.

Tags: books ebooks epublishing PDF interactive animation acrobat javascript 3D

Comments

[Zam]

Yes, interactive animations illustrating programming concepts could be useful but also quite tricky to make.

Zam
Ray Digital - Ebook Design, Ebook Development.
http://www.raydigital.com

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