Embedding Audio/Video Feature on a Kindle Device

Introduction

E-books have been in existence for quite some time now. Whether or not A/V content producers have come across the “first-generation” of these digital books, they are most likely intrigued to produce the relatively new interactive multimedia versions for either themselves or their customers.

What is interactive multimedia E-books?

The first generation E-books could include text and graphics that are directly visible on the screen, but cannot have embedded audio or video.

When we say interactive multimedia E-books, we mean electronic books that can include embedded audio and/or video.

The Objective

Normally, we create e-books in an EPub format for iPad and a Mobi format for Kindles. While EPub files can easily play audio and video content, Mobi files do not support multimedia content.

One of our potential customers requested a proposal from us to create interactive E-books that are compatible with Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle devices.

At the same time, we received another issue from another customer that the audio and video files in their e-books could not play on their Kindle devices, while the same files if purchased directly from Amazon could be played.

With these requests from our customers, we faced a need to study and analyze how the Audio and Video (A/V) playback functionality works in Amazon Kindle devices.

Findings & Limitations

• General Kindle e-reader devices did not support A/V playback.
• To support the A/V playback feature, we needed to change every e-book  file to a pdf  before converting to the same .kdp file.
• We also learned that embedded A/V files in MOBI are only allowed for trade publishers who can upload their e-books via FTP.
• Files uploaded via KDP had their embedded audio file stripped out of the e-book.

Conclusion

Based on the above findings we created a .kpf file via Kindle creator with our very own A/V content and published it via Amazon at a minimal cost. The A/V features are working just fine!

Future targets

As an established vendor for publishers,Jouve India is working towards a solution to successfully embed Audio/Video interactivity of multimedia E-books to cut down time and cost for our customers.