The ever-rising popularity of digital and mobile learning has led to the emergence of various new technologies and platforms. Interactive eBooks are an excellent solution that makes navigating these platforms much simpler and faster.
Besides being super useful for educational institutions, interactive eBooks also offer excellent solutions to businesses and organizations that wish to provide better content and improve retention rates.
You can easily bring your content to life using a powerful interactive eBook creator. It also offers you a range of features and countless possibilities to come up with robust digital publications without needing any technical knowledge.
In this blog, we will talk more about interactive textbooks, along with why and how you can create them.
What is an Interactive eBook?
Interactive eBooks are essentially digital publications that allow your audience to interact with them directly.
Built-in both native and HTML5 languages, these interactive eBooks include elements such as audio, videos, links, widgets, and various other touch-based interactions.
Powered by such elements, interactive eBooks primarily make it easier to grab readers’ attention because of higher engagement.
Why Create an Interactive eBook?
Some of the other reasons why you should create interactive eBooks include:
Easy Updating of Content
One of the key advantages of interactive eBooks is that they can be easily updated with new or fresh content and illustrations at regular intervals without having to incur too many expenses.
There are several advanced digital publishing platforms that you can use to either add multimedia or update digital content as and when required.
Drive Higher Engagement
Since interactive eBooks are full of rich multimedia content such as images, videos, audio, etc., they help you drive more engagement in comparison to traditional print books or regular eBooks.
Both organizations and educational institutions can leverage them to engage their customers/employees and students by simply adding a layer of interactivity for better engagement.
Immersive Experience
A range of rich functionalities and embedded multimedia in interactive eBooks help make the content contextually relevant. This, in turn, offers learners an immersive and enhanced reading experience overall.
Varied Applications
Another highlight of interactive eBooks is that they don’t just help educational publishers but also prove to be advantageous for businesses across the board for training and onboarding purposes.
Besides, eBooks offer an easy and effective way to strengthen branding and boost a business’s marketing efforts.
Better Accessibility
Interactive eBooks make the content more accessible for readers. They can read them anywhere on multiple devices, such as smartphones, tablets, eReaders, PCs, and more.
Besides, they also allow readers to download eBooks and access them offline, even without internet connectivity.
Cost-Efficiency
Compared to traditionally printed books, interactive eBooks are far more cost-effective. The cost of creating and printing different versions of a book is eliminated in an eBook. All you need to invest is in creating and designing your eBook.
How to Create an Interactive eBook for Free
Here is the step-wise process you can follow to create your interactive eBook using an interactive eBook maker:
1. Prepare the Content
Several free interactive eBook creators are available to create your eBook.
Some of the essential elements required to create a good eBook structure include an interesting title, a good visual cover, a table of contents, pages for the chapter titles, visual elements, mobile-friendliness, and a call-to-action.
Apart from this, you also need to determine the workflow of your interactive eBook. It includes the following elements:
- Writing
You can either write your eBook on the interactive eBook platform itself or import the main file from Word.
- Assets
Assets in an eBook refer to various visual and audio content, which you can add to your interactive eBook as and when required.
- Images
You can get amazing images from royalty-free websites or download them from other websites using a paid subscription.
Also, make sure to optimize large image sizes because several eBook publishing platforms are not fully compatible with media and have their own limitations.
- Video and Audio
For eBooks to be truly interactive, you need to add lots of videos and audio to make them engaging. Just like images, all the video/audio files must be optimized.
You can get audio from sites like Soundsnap and videos from Vimeo or YouTube after checking the copyright policy.
- Widgets
Interactive eBooks allow you to add widgets (games and calculators), which readers could use for a more entertaining experience. Widgets can also enable them to either watch a live video or check their real-time Twitter feed.
2. Finalize the Layout
As mentioned earlier, eBooks should be compatible with all the different devices, operating systems, and browsers.
So, apart from optimizing the elements of your eBook, i.e., the videos, audio, links, and animations, you also need to consider the layout to fulfill readers’ requirements better.
Primarily, there are two different types of layouts – a reflowable and fixed-layout format. The differences between the two are mentioned below:
| Reflowable format | Fixed layout format |
| Follows an automatic page orientation based on the screen size. | Irrespective of which device is used, the content remains static. |
| Supported by most leading eReaders such as iBooks, Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Apple, etc. | Limited support is available for a fixed content layout. |
| Allows readers to change both the font size and type. | Images and text size can’t be changed. |
3. Edit, Publish, and Distribute Your Interactive eBook
Remember that as the interactive elements in your eBook increase, it gets difficult to convert the same. Usually, the things that need to be worked upon here include spacing, headers, alignments, bullets, and quotes.
When it comes to the distribution of the eBook, you need to brainstorm and develop a detailed strategy to ensure desired outcomes in terms of profitability. Apart from this, some of the other aspects to need to consider before your eBook goes online include:
- Ensure that the book has a nice and enticing description to capture readers’ attention
- Do thorough keyword research in order to increase the online visibility of your eBook.
Create and Publish Your Interactive eBook With the Help of Experts
If you are looking to create an interactive eBook, partner with KITABOO to leverage our powerful interactive eBook software specially designed for eBooks.
From seamless publishing to making your content interactive for specific outcomes, we handle various aspects and requirements you might have. Leverage our vast experience and expertise and deliver an incredible interactive eBook for your readers.
Contact our expert team now and get started!
To know more, please write to us at KITABOO@hurix.com
Discover How An Ebook Conversion, Publishing & Distribution Platform Can Help You
Kitaboo is a cloud-based content platform to create-publish & securely distribute interactive mobile-ready ebooks.
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