Up until the mobile revolution particularly smartphones and tablets, most of the books were converted as ebook for passive reading. They hardly had any interactive elements or multimedia. For educational books, only certain complex topics/subjects of the book were created with multimedia elements using appropriate instructional pedagogic as the cost and time involved in developing such eLearning content is huge. But, with the advent of new mobile technologies (HTML5) and the epublishing standards (ePUB3), the cost and time involved in creating interactive and multimedia-rich books have drastically come down.
Taking advantage of these cost-effective new technologies and epublishing standards, many books are being converted with more and more interactive and multimedia elements to make their ebooks engaging. Now the question is: Are all interactive and multimedia-rich ebooks engaging? What really makes the ebooks more engaging?
At AEL Data, we offer digital services to both Publishing and Education Industries. Over the past 14 years, we have created, converted and enhanced content of various formats and types of content such as:
Educational Content – K-12 and Higher Secondary Books, and
Journals
Literary fictional and creative non-fictional books
Dictionaries
Trade magazines
News papers
Centuries old manuscripts, etc.
We believe that just adding more and more interactive and multimedia elements may not make the content engaging. But, definitely make the content very heavy to access via mobile devices. To make the content more engaging, instructional design is much helpful to decide when, where and what interactivity to be added. It is like bringing the concept of eLearning within ePublishing, so that the content can be both learner-friendly (eLearning) and digital-friendly (ePublishing).With this idea of blending eLearning and ePublishing, we initiated the development of Lektz, a framework that supports the distribution, protection and management of interactive content of both epublishing and eLearning standards– ePUB, ePUB3, HTML5, SCORM, TinCan. Please check out the recent version of Lektz readers for iOS, Android and Windows PC, which has built-in ‘Most Interactive eBook’ developed by AEL Data.
We would appreciate your comments and feedback.
AEL Data Services LLP 