How can I integrate video into my eBooks?

July 3, 2009 7:44 AM

Where are we going with video integration into eBooks?

I have been selling instructional eBooks for a few years now, and it is a steadily growing part of my 'business'. I'm about to begin exploring production of video instructional material, but rather than produce a stand-alone DVD, I would really like to integrate the two formats - written explanatory material, and video demonstration.

It seems to me that a how-to manual in eBook form, which incorporated embedded video clips at appropriate points in the text (to demonstrate the techniques being described) would be an excellent way to present the material.

At present, I could easily prepare links in my eBooks that 'jump out' to video content stored on the web, but that is only practical if the reader is viewing the eBook in a browser, and there would still be a 'disconnect' in the presentation. I can well imagine that a product like the upcoming Apple iPad (or whatever they're going to call it) will have the capability of displaying eBooks and of course playing video, but how do you think this will be integrated?

I really think that a 'book with inline video' would make a dynamite format for the kind of material I wish to present. Any ideas on 1) how this is going to be done in the 'next generation', or 2) how it can be done now?

posted by woodblock100 to technology (10 comments total)

Frankly, I recently got the idea for a science fiction story where no one could read at all because everyone watched videos to run machinery and do the tasks needed to keep things running. Its a good bet that we'll be seeing a lot more video in every presentation from here on out.
posted by Ironmouth at 8:21 AM on July 3

In the next generation electronic ink screens are going to be replaced with multimode versions capable of switching into a lcd mode where color video playback is possible. This will mean that the Kindle, Sony Reader and the like will be able to handle your video content.

In this generation it all depends on how you're delivering your content. If it is aimed at stand alone readers you're probably stuck with external links, the screens just can't do video. If you're on the computer you've obviously already got video capability either using a browser based display model or integrating the video into pdfs.
posted by ecurtz at 8:26 AM on July 3

Creating and publishing instructional pdfs with embedded video that are sold as CDs and DVD-ROMs is my current one-man-shop business; has been for the last 5 years. (You can look at my work here.) Don't know where we're going exactly tech-wise, but it's hard to imagine this won't continue to get easier, to create, to sell, and to use.

I spent 18 years as an editor and author in traditional book and magazine how-to publishing (at the Taunton Press), and left when it became clear to me that I could create pretty much everything that Taunton did on my own and to the same high production standard, by delivering on CD, and taking full advantage of the option to include video and audio clips wherever these would be the best way to deliver the info, AND understanding that there's plenty of info that isn't suited to video or audio delivery. I'd been trying to get my bosses to think more in these terms for years, without success.

Pdfs seemed to me then (and seem even more so today) to offer an excellent way to cover all the types of media and design opportunities I wanted to take advantage of, in one package: Full-color text and graphic layouts equal to anything possible in print publishing (whose work is of course usually delivered to the printer in pdf form) for all the non-videogenic material, charts, resource and supply lists with active links, animated and still diagrams, photos (with the capacity to offer huge libraries of full-color stills, way beyond what you could reasonably print), slideshows, audio narration, and video.

My tools are the same as when I started: Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign and Acrobat are the workhorses) and Final Cut Studio, but I could do virtually the same quality work with nothing more than iLife and iWork (tho I'd be stupid not to upgrade iMovie to Final Cut Express). I started with content I authored; now I produce and publish other authors.

My initial vision was Books on CD, heavy on the book technologies and metaphors: Mostly text and stills, "covers", chapters…, with video and other multimedia as icing—I was a print guy, after all, and it took me a while to realize how easy and how much faster the video part was going to be to produce. I also soon discovered that my audience (mostly older folk, not 20-somethings) really didn't want to read a "book" on a computer, so they bought my first product somewhat reluctantly, hoping I would come out with a real book eventually, and wondering if they could print the pdfs, which of course they could, but since they were optimized for screen reading (landscape, biggish type, lots of color, many pages) would be expensive. So, my subsequent productions I billed as "workshops" on CD, and I built the much reduced text and graphics in the pdfs around much-expanded video content, rather than the other way round.

This is what I'm still doing, but no matter how much sense this makes, sales are still determined more by the visibility and renown of the author, and by the content, than by my production metaphors and process. The "workshop on a disc" concept is certainly easier to explain than why my "book with video" isn't available on paper. A friend is also having good results as a self-publishing CD/pdf author; he's going light on the video, and keeps his layouts printer-friendly, including with each book a permission slip the owner can take to Kinkos when they want to print.

Recently, I did go back and recreate my first CD product as a print book, using a mainstream publisher who I was able to convince to let me bundle (and produce) a DVD-ROM with the book. It was wonderful to know, during the writing, that I would be able to show anything I wanted as a video as well as in text and pix, and to realize that I'd be able to include way more, and way bigger, stills and even text—along with tons more resource material, all as working links—on the disk, whenever the layout folks needed to cut or shrink the material.

I'm basically an evangelist for this whole idea and would be happy to correspond with you or anyone about it. Email's in my profile, here and at the first link above.
posted by dpcoffin at 9:52 AM on July 3 [4 favorites has favorites]

My tools are the same as when I started: Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign and Acrobat are the workhorses) and Final Cut Studio, but I could do virtually the same quality work with nothing more than iLife and iWork

Well, I'd still need Acrobat Pro; it's the only way I know of to put video and audio (and now Flash) into a pdf. And some kind of Illustrator clone would be very handy, too. I also bought one of these; it's like printing money (mostly small bills, but still money).
posted by dpcoffin at 11:38 AM on July 3

dpc, thanks for the extended reply - lots of good info there, and things to think about. I hadn't been aware that the newest versions of Acrobat were capable of embedding video into pdfs. But cheeze, what a price they are asking for the 'pro' 'extended' version of the software ... :-(

So the capability I want is actually already here! It thus becomes a question of the 'delivery mechanism'. Obviously, a pdf with plenty of embedded video is going to have a very healthy file size. I've been using Amazon S3 to store my stuff for download, so serving the books to the customers isn't such a problem, but without a good broadband connection, not many people are going to want to download a pdf that runs into the multi-hundred Mbytes ...

Delivering on CD has the downside of production/inventory expense, postage costs, and delayed delivery (as opposed to instant download). But even worse, I would suspect that not many of the next generation eBook (tablet) readers are going to have optical drives. Most normal text/pic eBooks will download in a few seconds to such readers, and that will probably become the standard delivery method.

So video-heavy pdfs - as useful as they seem for those of us marketing 'how-to' material - may end up falling between the cracks. The only alternative I can think of at the moment though, is to do it in HTML, and try and sell access to a password-protected site, something that is certainly not so consumer-friendly.
posted by woodblock100 at 10:04 PM on July 3

Embedding video with Acrobat has been a feature since before I decided to try it over 5 years ago, so older versions of Acrobat would be useful; don't need the latest one. The only thing the new one does uniquely is embed Flash.

Perhaps I'm about to make a lot of unfounded presumptions, let alone become evangelical—apologies in advance!—but I'm wondering why you assume that your market will prefer to use an ereader/tablet, and also may not have broadband, when so many more folks have computers than have readers, and certainly all that have readers have computers, too—and vast numbers also have access to broadband. Does your audience tend to be tech-shy or otherwise restricted? I'd have thought ereaders were for the uber-techy, so far anyway…

It seems to me that your readers will want your work regardless of how you choose to deliver it and will figure out how to access it in your chosen format, the more so since it's highly specialized and available from nobody else. Obviously, the more instant grat. it offers, the more impulse purchases you might get, but for such specialized info (woodblock printing, right? Lovely!!) the audience is presumably both very small and very motivated (like mine and my authors'); and from such a small pool, it seems even more unlikely that most, or even many, will only want it if it's a small download or in an ereader format. In general, I think it'll be a very long while before the world at large has more ereader access than optical-drive computer access, by which time many other things will no doubt be different, too, but always in the direction of favoring richer media and more available bandwidth.

Right now, CD production expense can be very minimal, at least here in the US, where there's intense competition for your duplication order; very good rates (a couple of bucks a printed, inserted, bookleted, shrink-wrapped disc, much less if not in cases and no inserts) are available for orders of 100 or less. I see that you're not in the US, but I ship my CDs in plastic DVD cases (about $0.40 each, including shipping to me; total weight with label and disc inside 3 oz.) like they use at Blockbuster for $1.56 First Class postage anywhere in the US, and never over $4 to anywhere in the world I've ever shipped to (less than 5 broken discs in as many years); I charge a flat $5 shipping and come out slightly ahead (not counting time and travel) since most of my customers are in the US.

My decisions as an designer serving an art-sensitive audience always start with esthetics slightly trumping efficiency and the CD medium has yet to force a compromise on me, on any score. (Well, CDs aren't very flip-thru-able… too bad!) Presumably there are a few folks amongst my potential audience that I'm cutting off, but I'm certain I loose far more simply by self-publishing (and doing no wholesaling, yet), than by choosing to deliver on disk. I.e., marketing is by far the biggest issue we face, not media, imo.

(Btw, I'm able to fit up to 1 1/2 hours of very clean Quicktime video on a CD, and still have room for around 50 to 100 MB of other content, so I haven't yet needed to bump up to DVD-ROMs. On a DVD you could go much longer and slightly better-looking, of course.)
posted by dpcoffin at 11:49 AM on July 4

I'm wondering why you assume that your market will prefer to use an ereader/tablet

I'm trying to 'leapfrog' towards the future. I think such devices are going to be ubiquitous, just a few years from now, and I'd like to 'get it right' the first time, rather than have to constantly re-format my material as time goes by.

That's a pipe dream of course, but for material like mine - which is 'timeless' (in the 'long tail' sense) - it's important. Over on the web side of things, I've had a site for twelve years now, and have had to format and re-format web pages more times than I care to think about, as the functionality has constantly improved. (HTML tags ~ CSS ~ using a CMS ...)

I'm thinking that the Apple product we are presumably going to see soon, may well be a game-changer in the way that the iPod was, and it's very possible that 'everybody' will be reading books (or whatever they evolve into) on such devices sooner than we would think possible. They'll be as portable as a book, as attractive as a book, and will have so much more functionality.

It seems to me that your readers will want your work regardless of how you choose to deliver it

Yes, absolutely. There is so much pent-up demand for my (currently non-existent) manual that I could print it on rolls of toilet paper and they'd still order it. And you're right - build a good media-rich product, and don't sweat the delivery method; that can adapt as technology moves forward.

May I ask about something you said earlier? ... it took me a while to realize how easy and how much faster the video part was going to be to produce ... Has this really been your experience? The only videos I've done so far are small introductory 'talking head' clips (like the silly one on this page), but even to get those looking at least basically presentable was quite a challenge. Text and still pictures seems simple in comparison ...
posted by woodblock100 at 3:41 PM on July 4

I see; makes sense.

This looks like a game-changer, for sure. But what part of the game? Not the content creation part, or the page-design part, or the video shooting and editing part, if this and its competitors will even play video, or sound. But surely something like this that does allow rich media is coming. Will it play pdfs, or browse the web? I wonder which format is likely to be more quickly readable by these big, full-color mobile displays? And how challenging will adding rich-media playback actually be, either via pdfs, html, or some other similar format, to devices like these? I haven't a clue, but somebody out there must. Can anybody here shed some light…?

But no matter how quickly these things arrive and are adopted by your readers or mine, the content-creation challenges will be pretty much the same: Choose your topics and organize your info well, write good directions, take good pix, and (we seem to agree), create clear, attractive video clips. So, better to be sharpening those skills, and developing content anyway, however you prefer to work.

Actually, I must admit that the rich-media part, while it's obviously growing fast on the web, isn't burning up the pdf world at all, despite how easy it is to add to pdfs, as far as I can tell. When I post rich-media questions to Adobe, Acrobat, InDesign and similar forums, I rarely get any answers; I almost never run across rich-media pdfs, or creators of them, or readers asking for more; I'd be lying if I implied that rich-media pdfs were hot, either amongst makers or readers; nobody seems to even know about them—you didn't, I note!

It's interesting to compare pdfs to web pages, since you can do almost all the same things with them. In fact, one might just as well build CD-delivered rich-media ebooks in the form of off-line, local web sites as pdf docs., maybe even more sensibly. (You wouldn't need Acrobat…) I chose pdfs because I'd never built a web page, but I knew page-layout tools and because I wanted to make book-like things, with fixed pages designed as if they were supposed to be printed, every detail under my control. At the time (5 years ago), web pages seemed very limiting to me, but are they now? If you don't want or need a fixed page (and for upcoming mobile devices that may be a disadvantage), HTML/CSS could be a better way to go, whether you want rich media or not, or disc delivery or downloadables.

About video:
The key idea I had when I started was that all I needed was lots of little video "clips," not a complete show or any kind of big-deal video-only production. I was thinking of stills in print coming briefly to life, like a picture in a Harry Potter newspaper. So I figured I could manage that, with my zero knowledge of video production, but considerable experience shooting stills for publication. It was more complex than that, of course, but I was motivated and interested, so it's been an enjoyable ride learning about video editing and shooting. And the "clip" idea has turned out to be a useful one: I shoot (and keep separate) many short segments, of only the material that seems suited to video, leaving the text and stills to take care of intros and any other talking-head stuff that you'd need in a video-only production

As for video being easier than text and stills, that was true for me at the start since I was creating a book-length treatment. I basically wrote the book first (since that was what I knew how to do), then took a deep breath and shot some short clips to illustrate a few of the more complex processes I'd just written about. What struck me right away was how I should have done the videos first, because they would have rendered much of the writing I'd labored over redundant. Getting them to look good was complex, true, but once figured out, was no longer an issue. For a short topic, I can well imagine that shooting a video seems a bigger challenge than just writing down some steps and taking some stills if you've never shot much video before.
posted by dpcoffin at 12:06 AM on July 5

It's interesting to compare pdfs to web pages, since you can do almost all the same things with them.

Yes indeed, and this kind of explains why - as you said - rich-media pdfs are so unknown (and I readily admit to my own ignorance of the form). The very web itself is the 'rich media' that has captured our attention.

But there is one very big difference. You can't sell the web, but you can sell a book.

And I've got a perfect example to 'prove' this (in my own experience, anyway). Some years back, I scanned and uploaded an old out-of-print textbook on woodblock printmaking. It is an excellent book, packed with useful information, and gets more page accesses than any other section of my website. (There are no access controls - passwords, etc. - it is completely open for anybody to browse.)

Then, just about two years ago, basically as an experiment, I used InDesign to create a nicely formatted pdf of the same book, and put it in my online shop for a price of $7.50. The previous open-to-anybody' HTML pages are still there, and still get great access, but the pdf is now at 122 copies sold - and counting. I'm certainly not going to get rich at $7.50 a pop, but that's way more than I would get in a royalty if this were being published in traditional paper form.

As you mentioned earlier, the audience may be very small, but it is very motivated, and this experiment seems to show that - as long as the price is seen as being 'reasonable' - people will happily pay for the privilege of having some kind of 'object' in their own possession ... even if it is only electrons.

I think we're on the same page here, and I'm happy to see your example of a successful approach to this, and to hear your advice. No question but that I'm going to move ahead with my own original 'text' in this format, and am now working on the outline ... Thanks for all the input!
posted by woodblock100 at 12:44 AM on July 5

Interesting; I just did something very similar last Xmas: I scanned an OOP booklet I wrote in the mid-1980s (when self-publishing was done with a photocopier), cleaned the pages in PS, reassembled in ID, and now sell the pdf for $8.00… and have sold just about as many as you report.

Please do feel free to contact me off the Green any time; I'd love to help, and to hear what you're doing and deciding…
posted by dpcoffin at 2:09 AM on July 5