The Missed Opportunity for Interactive Book Content
EPUB is the format most e-books are distributed. (A file with the .epub extension.) EPUB is technically a zipped webpage under the hood.
The EPUB 3.3 specification defines support for audio, video, and scripting. It leaves scripting support optional for reading systems. In theory this should have lead to e-books—especially technical or textbooks—to use the technology to better ilustrate their points.
Very few e-book readers support the full EPUB 3.3 spec, however. Apparently Apple Books and the Thronium epub are the most complete. But the Kindle mobile and desktop apps only have partial support1, and Amazon’s Kindle e-ink devices, Kobo e-readers, and Adobe Digital Editions don’t support those parts of the spec at all.
The interactive-textbook demand is real. That’s why technical publishing has mostly routed around EPUB. They still offer their books in EPUB or PDF formats, but O’Reilly and others have developed their own browser-based platforms: executable notebooks, companion websites… which they offer as a complement to many titles they publish. They control the experience, and make sure it runs as they intended it to.
Most of the time these interactive experiences are not downloadable. You rely on the publisher’s platform and sometimes a subscription to access the experience. If they decide to retire a title and its interactive content because its old or for whatever reason, or increase the subscription prices, there is nothing you can do about it2.
The irony is that an open, downloadable standard specified the capability but made it optional… and now e-books interactivity lives behind a subscription on someone else’s server.
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While Amazon has done a lot of improvement to e-books, they have remained mostly propietary and in service of their ecosystem. Also, the Kindle Desktop app, from the user experience point of view, is lacking and hasn’t improved much over the years. ↩︎
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When you buy an e-book on Amazon, for example, you are not actually buying the book: you are purchasing a content license. Kindle content is licensed, not sold. If you delete or Amazon cancels your Amazon account, you lose your library. ↩︎