
Page from an ebook app with read-aloud audio. Click to enlarge or watch a video of this app in the App section below. (From Hairy Maclary by Lynley Dodd, production by Kiwa Media.)
Formats for enhanced ebooks
Enhanced ebooks go beyond the simple layouts of most ebooks to offer more complex formatting, illustration, and rich media such as video, audio and program-like interactions. As we’ve just seen, updates to the EPUB and Kindle formats — EPUB3 and Kindle KF8 — provide the advanced features needed for enhanced ebooks. A new breed of e-reading devices and apps is emerging to support these new versions.
But several other systems have emerged to tackle the enhanced ebook market, some of them optimized for specific markets such as magazines, textbooks, comics or children’s books. It’s possible EPUB3 and KF8 will supersede them but that’s still an open question: Each format and production system offers features and advantages over EPUB3 and KF8.
We’ll take a brief look at some of the more important formats being used today to produce enhanced ebooks in this changing landscape.
- PDF (Portable Document Format)
- Apps
- Fixed layout ebooks
- Web apps
And we’ll look at two popular tools for producing enhanced ebooks
- Adobe Digital Publishing Suite
- Apple iBooks Author
These tools and formats are just a small selection of the many options to produce enhanced digital publications. Each of these has solid backing and supporters among the publishing community but this is a field where we’re still some way from having a widely-adopted standard.
Example: Making a simple picture ebook
Before we introduce the various formats you can choose from, let’s take a quick look at the production of a simple picture ebook designed for the Kindle KF8 format.
PDF (Portable Document Format)
Let’s start with a format that’s been around for decades and is still widely used. PDF (Portable Document Format) from Adobe Systems can be read on any PC or Mac and most mobile devices using free the Adobe Reader software found in many applications.
This ubiquity has made it popular as an ebook format and you’ll still see PDF as an option in many ebookstores. Its main feature is that it preserves print layout but, as we saw earlier, these layouts lack the ability to reflow text and don’t work well on newer mobile devices.
Apps
The term ‘app’ is short for application: it is a small software program written to install automatically on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. Apple popularised the term when it opened its App Store in 2008 for the iPhone and later for the iPad.
A book wouldn’t normally be associated with a piece of software. But many publishers have produced books as apps to take advantage of sophisticated features that weren’t available to them with ebook formats.
Here’s a video showing a children’s book app in action.
Fixed Layout Ebooks
Several ebooksellers have introduced extensions to the EPUB and Kindle reflowable formats – to stop them from reflowing. This might seem like an odd thing to do, but the point is to make them work with illustrated layouts, such as children’s books, cookbooks, graphic novels and comics, or magazines, where you need to preserve the exact layout.
This is similar to what a PDF does but fixed-layout ebooks work within the standard EPUB and Kindle formats, meaning that ‘under the hood’ they use open web standards such as HTML which can be easily reformatted and re-purposed for other uses.
The image below shows an example of a fixed layout EPUB ebook produced for the Kobo ebookstore. The ebook also includes read-aloud audio.

Page from a fixed layout EPUB ebook with read-aloud audio. Click to enlarge. (From Milly Molly and the Bike Ride by Gill Pittar, illustrated by Cris Morrell, production by Kiwa Media.)
Web apps
An emerging technology is called web apps. These apps offer many of the advantages of the native apps while also removing some of the disadvantages, especially the need to produce multiple versions for each platform and having to sell through a particular vendor’s app store.
Instead of being written using the complex, usually proprietary, programming languages associated with “native” apps, these apps are written using HTML (especially the latest version HTML5) and other web technologies (notably CSS3 and Javascript), essentially the same technologies that underpin ebooks.
Two examples of tools that produce multimedia ebooks
There is a rapidly-expanding selection of tools to produce enhanced ebooks. We’ll look at two popular options below. Adobe and Apple offer software that you install on your PC or Mac but a fast-growing category of newcomers operate entirely online via your web browser, no local software required. We look in more detail at the various options in the Production module.
Adobe Digital Publishing Suite
Most book and magazine publishers today use Adobe InDesign as their main page layout application. Adobe DPS (Digital Publishing Suite) uses the familiar InDesign program to produce rich ebooks and tablet editions of digital magazines. It uses Adobe’s proprietary .folio format, a production format which allows publishers to:
- Produce rich media publications with animation, video, and complex, multi-column layouts using Adobe InDesign.
- Convert them to apps and publish them to app stores so they can be sold and read on a range of tablet devices
Apple iBooks 2 and iBooks Author
Apple has produced a free program called iBooks Author to create rich media ebooks for the Apple iPad. It runs on a Macintosh computer and makes it easy to produce highly-designed ebooks, even by non-technical users, such as authors and teachers.
The resulting ebooks are sold through Apple’s iBookStore. Apple has aimed Author at the textbook market but it will work for any ebook with a complex design or for multimedia.
The ebooks produced with Author are in iBooks 2 format, which is only readable on Apple devices, though it is based on EPUB3. Apple allows publishers to distribute free editions of ebooks produced with Author but, if they want to sell them, they must go through the Apple iBookstore.
While this is restrictive, Apple is a big player in the consumer and education markets, and its iBooks 2 format and Author creation tool can produce high-quality illustrated works, making it attractive for many ebook projects.
So, which format is the right format?
Unfortunately, there’s still no ‘right’ answer to this question, making it challenging for publishers who want to move beyond simple narrative ebooks. Here are a couple of tips to help you decide.
#1 Enhanced ebooks are for small niches
If you want your ebooks to be widely-readable, stick to the older EPUB and basic Kindle formats (or PDF). Standards are still evolving — including the publishing industry’s open standard EPUB3 — and many enhanced ebook projects remain experimental.
#2 ‘Reader first’, not ‘production first’
If you plan to produce some enhanced ebooks, the best strategy is to start with the reader, not the design or production considerations. Start by identifying:
- The target readers
- The distribution channels to reach them
This will narrow down the format choices while also ensuring that your enhanced ebook is as widely available to your target readers as possible.
Production advances are happening rapidly
We’ll look at production options when we get to the section on Production. It’s a field that is advancing rapidly and opening up an increasing (and often confusing) range of choices, many aimed at simplifying the process for non-technical publishers to produce apps or enhanced ebooks in-house.
Resources
Find out more about this topic on our Digital Publishing 101 useful resources site.