Ebook?!

First things first, what on earth is an Ebook?!

An Ebook is an electronic book or a digital book that can be read on multiple digital platforms including the Ipad.

"Ebooks can be anything from the digital version of a paper book, to more interactive content that includes hyperlinks and multimedia"
www.planetebook.com/mainpage.asp

After the class digging deeper into what we need to do for this project, I realised that the one bit I am stuck on is visualising what the finished product is going to look like, and I think this comes down to calling it an Ebook. When I first heard that it was an Ebook I instantly thought of a text heavy page which you turn to get another text heavy page with the occasional picture. This however is not the case with what we are doing, from what I have gathered from looking at other example of Ebooks (even though there are no accurate example for this project as we are doing something quite new in the field) I gather it will look more like a picture book with animation and video tied into it so that it looks seamless and becomes interactive. I have been shown a little on how to use Ibook author which is the software we will use to create the Ebook once we have all our elements together and I have started to see how we are going to make it work. We have also been shown a tutorial on how to make a photo seem more 3D which was really helpful and inspiring. After these few lessons on options we can use in our Ebooks, I have a much better understanding of what it will look like, however I don't think I will have a complete idea until I start using Ibooks more or maybe even until I start putting my project together in it!
So until then I will need to really get thinking about what story I am doing to give myself the best chance of being able to build it well. 


Some examples



This is an advert for "The Beatles Yellow Submarine", this book is available on the Ibooks store and while this book is coded and hugely complex, this gives a good idea of how you can take the Ibook away from being a normal plain book. This book shows how interactive and interesting the Ebooks can be. This has really got me thinking about what I can make my book look like and what I can make it do. 

Here is an example of documentary animation that I found very useful for this project.
This animation uses mainly photos which apear to have been cut out leaving a white edge which shows they are photos. The colour scheme is quite de-saturated which I think also really works well here and the important objects seem to be a lot brighter making them stand out from the background.
Although there is no audio telling the story in this piece the message is clear and I think works perfectly without spoken audio.

In this documentary animation the use of spoken audio is very strong, the animation would not work without it. From start to finish we are spoken through a story, with the passion of the words spoken it makes the whole piece seem more real. The colour scheme in this animation mainly suites the book keeping an orangey brown town, but the odd colour is thrown in to make the scenes work. This animation is very effective and tells a real story from start to end. What this animation also has is a credit roll at the end where it thanks the people taking part. I think this is a great idea and I will try and use this in my book.