Antonio's Tale

On our eternal quest to create better digital content production tools, and better digital content, just every now and then, the plot gets lost.

Antonio's Tale is just such a loss of the plot. But it was a lot of fun stringing it together. Antonio's Tale is a multi-media audio-remixing book for five year olds who like thrills and noise.

The idea was a simple landscape epub3 fixed layout story with some simple audio interactivity. Again we are staying with 16:9 aspect ratio because we are targeting desktops and Android devices, and there are enough 4:3 examples out there. It is  also fun designing for widescreen drama.

This is an ePub3 fixed layout interpretation of a story our father used to tell us when we were young (and gullible). That was before TV was invented and storytime was major entertainment. Antonio's Tale is an example of how a story is told is as important as the story itself.

The "business" purpose in putting this together was of course to show the potential of ePub3 with lots of CSS-3 and rich media, all to highlight the fixed layout features in the latest AZARDI Desktop.

The downside of working the CSS animations very hard and playing multiple audio tracks at the same time is that iBooks groans or just wont do it. We may make a feature limited edition just for Apple's iBooks.

However the objective of AZARDI and these demonstration books is to show what ePub3 can and should be able to do. Another consideration is HTML5 vs. ePub3. Is it correct to limit the evolution of published content to packaged apps and print-book simulcrums.

We used a lot of Sound Effects and Music in this media rich book, all sourced from http://www.freesfx.co.uk/ ➤. Thank you wonderful FreeSFX people for a great resource. Antonio has registered his appreciation.

You can download Antonio's Story ➤ from the AZARDI ePub3 free samples and demonstrations page.

If you are "blessed" with under seven or eight year olds, get them clicking the NEXT button.