Comics as ePubs question

[Fitz Frobozz]

I recently picked up some Jim Woodring Kindle editions (example), and I'm curious about the formatting and makeup of the books. Would really appreciate some insight from folks who know more about this than I currently do.

The Amazon web pages for each book have the Comixology branding stuff which makes sense given what the books are, but my Manage Your Content and Devices downloads are AZW3s, and when opened in the Calibre e-book editor some of the html elements look strange.

For example:

<a data-app-amzn-magnify="{&quot;targetId&quot;: &quot;reg-1-magTargetParent&quot;, &quot;ordinal&quot;:1}" style="display:block; width:100%; height:100%" class="app-amzn-magnify"></a>

Is that fairly normal for comics whose publishers chose the AZW3 format?

Outside of just wanting to understand this situation better and expand what I know about ePub production, I'm also looking at this because I'm pretty new to image-heavy ePubs and digital comics, and am planning to to create a bunch of personal use ePubs (i.e., no plans to sell anything) that are very image heavy (family memorabilia and such), and this strikes me as potentially being a good use case for a comic book like ePub structure/format.

Thoughts? Input? Thanks!

[jhowell]

That is an example of Amazon's proprietary formatting for comics. It is used to enable guided view where panels are shown in sequence in Kindle apps and devices. That markup is non-standard and won't work anywhere else.

Here is some limited documentation: Creating Fixed-Layout Books with Image Pop-Ups or Virtual Panels

[Fitz Frobozz]

That's very helpful and informative, appreciated. I think part of what confused me was making the incorrect assumption that they would follow standards, which in hindsight was pretty silly of me given that they've done this sort of thing before. (Also, I'd been scrutinizing this other format instead, which I think was only adding to my confusion.)

For media-rich content that includes a fairly wide variety of media types, are there any non-proprietary formats you might recommend? I would prefer to more or less future-proof the books in this project, as they will eventually be included in a family archive that I curate and plan to hand off one day. I'm still adding to my ePub knowledge (drawing from a webdev background, which isn't always helpful, heh), so I have a ways to go before I get a handle on the options. (I should also mention that I'm working on something in Obsidian, in parallel.)

Still going to explore and play around with the two related Amazon formats ("Fixed-Layout with Image Pop-Ups or Virtual Panels" and "Fixed-Layout with Text Pop-Ups" -- is there an acronym people use for these?) further, but probably only for the sake of understanding them better.

[Turtle91]

ePub3 with perhaps some JS will keep it open format and ‘future proof’.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by Fitz Frobozz

Still going to explore and play around with the two related Amazon formats ("Fixed-Layout with Image Pop-Ups or Virtual Panels" and "Fixed-Layout with Text Pop-Ups" -- is there an acronym people use for these?) further, but probably only for the sake of understanding them better.

As someone who likes to delve into the technical details I can understand the desire to see how things work.

These days few ever see that markup. Amazon’s Kindle Create software allows someone publishing a comic to mark the individual panels in a GUI interface.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by Fitz Frobozz

For media-rich content that includes a fairly wide variety of media types, are there any non-proprietary formats you might recommend?

for comics specifically I would recommend CBR, CBZ, and PDF as the most common non-proprietary formats in use.