Using ePUB

Long live Digital Publishing

A lot happens in two years, and blogging on about ePubs is a bit of a dead end.

To celebrate 2011 this blog will no longer be used. Digital Publishing is the exciting new avatar and addresses larger digital content issues for publishers. The focus is still on the practical, but with more business strategy orientation and some advice on how to go beyond ePubs with digital content.

Thank you to all who have stopped by, and especially those who have made a comment or two.

Dirty Little Hacks in ePub

Epub is epub and devices are devices. With iPad ignoring text-align: center; there is a lot of extra work going on out there to put in substitute elements to make ePub work with devices. Every new device presents new "challenges". 

The most common hack to overcome this iPad problem is to introduce a blank <span> statement into the paragraph. It can be a lot of work and looks like this:

<p class="center-me"><span>I am text that wants to be centered</span></p>

Digital Content in the Wild

I haven't blogged quite some time. The excuse is work, lots of it. But very interesting work.

Getting IGP:Distribution Manager deployed and working in a number of locations and languages; designing methods for large scale ePub production of art and heavily illustrated books; improving the subtleties of online typography in IGP:FLIP; and the intensity of creating the specification and software design for IGP:Content Fulfilment Systems with AZARDI II - have all taken a lot of clock cycles.

This post is not so much about ePubs, but what to do with the ePubs once they have been produced and our experiences with just that. 

How we make great ePubs

Making great ePubs is about attention to detail and not being the cheapest in town. There are two big voices in the ePub "noise-o-sphere" at the moment. Digitization outfits offering to do conversion cheaper and better, and trade book designers lamenting loosing typography and X-Y page layout. With these two themes dominating discussions, it is little wonder that the ePubs produced generally suck.

When you free yourself from both of these considerations, you can settle down and do some great e-content work. Digitization quality is a given requirement, e-books have much more going for them than page-like layout.

This post is about real information books not fiction and linear non-fiction which is somewhat pedestrian - compared to more information based content. This month alone we have processed e-books on the following subjects:

IGP:Distribution Manager released

You have produced your ePub. Next the final step of the e-Pub and ebook publishing process is getting your books to the various retail sales channels. Depending on the genres of your books this can be more or less complex.

IGP:Distribution Manager addresses this problem directly making it easy for Publishers of all sizes to distribution multiple books to multiple aggregator, retailer and search channels.

Publishers publish works for authors in a number of expressions. Traditionally these were only print books. These were sent to a distribution agent for physical shipping to main street bookstores, or to a customer via courier after an online transaction.

Now there are multiple e-book formats that need to be delivered to multiple organizations who are in the business of selling digital formats for use in an increasing range of digital devices. This situation is probably going to become a lot messier before, and if it settles down.

ePub-Print Simultaneous Design IV. Flow

Once we get past simple linear reading books, the real challenge in designing for online, ePub and print in a simultaneous design production environment is planning and executing content flows for the different presentation contexts.

There are a number of options available to create a format optimized reader experience. What works for print, does not work for e-books, especially with a text-book style document such as this exercise example, This Dynamic Earth (TDE) by W. Jacquelyne Kious and Robert I. Tilling.

This book is available online as a web pages. It was one of the few copyright free content sources that was adequately "textbook" for this exercise. Unfortunately there are no print resolution images available, so both online and print images may look a little fuzzy. But this blog is about Simultaneous Design, not image processing!

ePub-Print Simultaneous Design IV. Coming soon.

I am still compiling the list of Simultaneous Design guidelines but have been asked to give a preview of the subject material by several impatient readers. 

We have taken the  web document "This Dynamic Earth" and turned it into a textbook layout and ePub. This is a public domain resource available at  http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/dynamic.html

Here are a couple of sneak previews of the image. The pages are A4 (210mm x 296mm). The first image shows a two page spread of the title page for the print PDF produced using IGP:FLIP. On the left you can see the ePub title page version instantlly created in ePub. Here it is shown in in ADE. 

The following image is a sample PDF two page spread from the document interior.

The full SDIV design article will be ready shortly. Watch this space!

 

ePub-Print Simultaneous Design III.5. Format Capabilities Chart

While writing SD4 it struck me that I have a lot of experience making e-book formats for a very wide range of devices. We have been at it around the clock since 1999 after all. That analysis of devices by their features, behaviours, limitations and bugs is not something anyone understands intuitively until a lot of digital content water has passed by.

This references the earlier post on content type analysis for various format capabilities. Read this for more context for the chart. Simultaneous Design is a growing series and should be read in sequence.

I created this Format Selection Chart for people unfamiliar with the device quirk driven nature of the digital content production business, and to demonstrate that all e-book formats are not equal in their capabilities. The outcome is a Simultaneous Design decision matrix that can be referred while wrestling with the points, pixels, RGB's and CMYKs that are Simultaneous Design for Print and ePub.

ANNOUNCEMENT: e-Content for Asia

With the amazing help and cooperation of an IGP:Portal Partner we have now got CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) working in IGP:FLIP. That means the benefits of simultaneous production of print PDF, Online Content and ePubs is exactly the same for Asian ideographs as for Western European languages. The considerations:

1. Your fonts must be Unicode (they will be huge but can be simplified or traditional).
2. The CJK will  be left to right. No top down right to left sorry.
3. If you are making an ePub your e-Reader device must be Asian language empowered, but that is generally not an issue for a Sony Reader.

That means we now officially support: 

1. All Western and Eastern European languages: Latin, Greek Cyrillic
2. All CJK languages: Chinese, Japanese and Korean
3. All Indic scripts

That just leaves Thai, Arabic and Hebrew to round out the trickiest aspects of rendering and working with the languages of the world.

Of course this doesn't mean devices or readers support all these languages. But if you create the content, maybe the knob brigade will bring the readers.If they don't we go HTML5 and Android.

The only language we have really left to conquer is the ever challenging MathML, the ultimate lingua franca.

ePub-Print Simultaneous Design III

The business scenario for Simultaneous Design II  was taking simple trade book manuscript to a print PDF and ePub into some distribution channels. SDIII brings some of Phil Spinelli's Surviving the Transition to Digital guide into practical relevance. This post addresses the first three "Surviving" points:

1. Digital Publishing requires a different Editorial perspective ...

We are creating a collectors edition of the first book, with additional content. We will do a marketing push using ePub first. If it does well we may consider a print version. This gives us very low production costs, and lets us evaluate the business potential of the new edition.

2. Digital publishing requires a different Production perspective ...

We have already put the book out as a standard novel. This time we are increasing the design components and adding more content to move it beyond the novel and into the special interest category.

3. Digital Publishing requires a different Archiving perspective ...

The digital content for the book we are working on is already in IGP:FLIP and available for instant XML value-add action.