When outputting books to the iPhone (and the Palm Pilot before that) I need to be able to reflow text to keep the file size small and work with the small screen.

With the larger screen, creating small files using XHTML and CSS will only make sense if the applications allow for most of CSS. I can see where absolute positioning won’t work, but relative should, as well as most other commands. Right now, on the iPhone, although claim the can work with EPUB files, they all ignore most (if not all) if the CSS. (They also ignore unicode-based HTML entities.)

David: If you know an iPhone app that plays well with EPUB and allows the user to upload their own books, please let me know.

Another interesting thing (to me at least) is rich media ePub, where audio, video, etc are part of the experience. Here’s a link to an example by someone I’m planning to speak to at TOC: http://blog.bluefire.tv/?p=60

Currently on the iPhone, the only application that provides all the features being asked for, at least by me, is eReader. This application still uses its proprietary modification of Palm Markup Language, and moving from text to a valid book file is cumbersome and buggy. Stanza, the application listed by everyone as using EPUB, doesn’t recognize simple formatting like italics, bold, and indents. Plus it insists on adding a line between paragraphs and grossly large chapter titles. I find it essentially useless for good output.

The easiest and cleanest way to do this is to place your figures as inline graphics within the main text flow. Placing them in their own paragraph line with Leading set to “Auto” will allow you to easily adjust spacing around the figure without the need for text wrap.
If you have a caption accompanying the figure, simply place that as your paragraph immediately following it and style accordingly.

If your figure (with or without caption) visually needs to be placed outside of the text frame, follow the exact same steps as above, but place your inline figure (with or without caption) into its own text frame.
This frame should then be anchored somewhere within the main text frame.
Never anchor inside paragraphs, sentences, or words. When exported to ePub, the anchor will then split your paragraph where the anchor is placed.
Here are 3 options (rules) for anchoring:
1. Place the anchor into it’s own line with a Leading of 0.
2. Place the anchor before the first character of a paragraph. (This option will ensure that the figure will appear before that paragraph when exported to ePub.)
3. Place the anchor after the last character (or punctuation) of a paragraph. (This option will ensure that the figure will appear after that paragraph when exported to ePub.)

As for tables:
Tables are inline by default, so they will translate just fine if set within the main text frame.
However, if your table needs to be placed outside of the main text frame, place your table into its own text frame and follow the exact same rules for figures above.

hope this helps.

Similarly, I fear that what one person wrote above that we won’t be able to drag and drop ebooks onto the iPad like we can with, say, the Sony Reader. I fear that I will stick to Sony if all of the ebooks that I have bought so far can’t be shifted onto the iPad without having to repurchase them all again.

I also like how I can use Indesign to make my own ebooks (I write) and test the resulting epub files on my Reader. I fear we won’t be able to do that on the iPad, which will infuriate “early adopters” of gadgets who totally embraced ebooks, ePub and e-reader years ago

For the most part the mobile device can interpret the page as it was designed for a desktop browser, but special style rules can be applied for those specific devices.

Until a standard has evolved, individual formats may (painfully) have to be applied in order to be marketable for each different reader.

of note – I find the topic of Flash interesting. I avoid it especially as most “flashy” effects must be purchased. I use functional tricks developed in jQuery which, I’ll bet, works smooth-as-silk on the iPad.

By customizing the position of an anchored object, you can move it anywhere on the page you like, which is necessary if you want to create just one version of a publication that works for both print and EPUB export.

Be aware that when you create a custom anchored object, this results in an extra space where the object is anchored (if it is anchored to its own paragraph). So the trick is to apply a leading value of zero to that paragraph and the extra space will be removed.