Using ePUB

ePub and Spine Order

Let's open this topic with a comment designed to split the readers into two camps.

Don't fall into extensive reordering the e-book spine trap. It has no real benefits, raises the cost of production, and reduces and devalues "The Book".

• Remove the minimum number of pages you can. That probably means Half-title page.
• All sections don't have to be in the NCX, and they don't have to appear in the NCX in the order they are in the spine. (Explained later).
• e-Up the various front and back matter section concepts rather than destroy them as irrelevant for e-books.

Fiction and narrative non-fiction are not really affected by any of this. But nearly every other publishing genre is. This post is targeted at small publishers who may be producing e-books for the first time and need a little background on why some things are done, should they be done, and do they have options or is it "e-book law".

Multimedia iPad

"Where are all the multimedia e-books?" people have been heard to ask.

Given our recent tests with various CSS properties and iPad, we took it all a step further, adding transitions and transforms to the mix. In the '90s all this stuff used to be called "New Media". At that time we were deeply involved in creating interactive CD-ROM products on all sorts of subjects, so it wasn't hard to get started on the first real NEWnew Media ePub framework.

This is a work in progress. But we started with a basic set of reusable XHTML Content Blocks...

ePub Image Test Cases

This is a set of image presentation options for ePad in general and iPad in particular.

We live in a world where the screens range from the tiny to huge, and aspect ratios vary widely. Image handling in digital content should address the widest number of delivery environments. There are a number of recommendations on sizing images for different device screen, but little guidance on how to make images work for all of them.

Static images, made to some X-Y size are inherently device specific, and often  disappointing in different sized reading contexts. The approach we take is to use a simple little XHTML structure and CSS resizing to make the image proportional to the devices screen size. This works well most of the time. Images can be made larger - thinking of a wider range of devices - while performing under control in a document irrespective of screen size.

ePub Image Test Cases

This is a set of image presentation options for ePad in general and iPad in particular.

We live in a world where the screens range from the tiny to huge, and aspect ratios vary widely. Image handling in digital content should address the widest number of delivery environments. There are a number of recommendations on sizing images for different device screen, but little guidance on how to make images work for all of them.

Static images, made to some X-Y size are inherently device specific, and often  disappointing in different sized reading contexts. The approach we take is to use a simple little XHTML structure and CSS resizing to make the image proportional to the devices screen size. This works well most of the time. Images can be made larger - thinking of a wider range of devices - while performing under control in a document irrespective of screen size.

Google Fonts

OK, not strictly ePub, but very interesting on the subject of typography-not-paper in general, is the launch of Google fonts . just 18 fonts as the starter kit, using SIL and Apache licenses. A lot better than the 18 that were not there yesterday.

If this grows (which it should), there will be some interesting pressure on e-Typography (or iTypography) in general. I managed to waste a few hours today embedding their fonts into all sorts of web pages with obscure class statements and pseudo-elements, just for the hell of it, and to get the feel of the tools. To be able to put something like extract-rw p:first-child {font family: 'Crimson Text';} into a web page is definitely a new luxury.

It is somewhat reassuring when you create your page, the user is going to get the fonts you intended, whether they want/know it or not. These fonts probably wont come through on iSomething devices, which should be interesting in itself. Since HTML5 and channel delivered content are going to continue to grow apace, this one is well worth watching. It is certainly good to see fonts taking a front-stage web position at least for a while.

iPad CSS Serious Fun with Noteboxes

After a week of stressful hyphens, we thought it was time to play with the fluffy parts of ePub for iPad. The agenda was of course to see what extras could be wrung out of iPad using extended CSS features.

Please remember, we are not saying this should be done, the exercise is to discover what can be done. However for non-fiction trade publishers this does open up interesting value propositions. Where a book can only be done in gray because of printing costs, the ePub could reflect a higher level of design  including colour and design elements not available in print.This was eerily reminiscent of our earlier exercise making flashcards. 

Hyphenation in ePub Continued

Just to keep the saga on typography in iPad moving, I created a few simple test cases to see what happened. The results speak for themselves (except I cannot resist some comments of course).

So this is typically long-winded and a bit specialist. If you are interested in typography in ePub devices... read on!

A Digital Content Senior Statesman

I have just had the "experience" of creating my very first YouTube video. This epic is on creating ePubs and PDFs from a structure styled manuscript using IGP:FLIP, our real-groove digital content publishing platform (Yes! I am allowed to say "real groovy", because of my senior statesman status). As a person who occupies the "not young" part of the digital trend curve, this can only be regarded as a major achievement.

I have been using the Internet for business and various customers since 1996 and always regarded it (the Internet) as a three steps backward environment when it comes to real interactive stuff (HTML5 Canvas is changing the landscape!). It has taken me four years as an account holder to actually upload a video to YouTube!

Embedded Fonts in ePub for iPad

We are still getting questions from publishers about the whole embedded fonts in ePubs and iPad. For example:

"Will an epub with embedded fonts be an issue or not? I'm assuming that on the Sony eReader (ADE) it will display fine, but will it cause a problem with the iPad. The font the designers have used is Sabon, so will the iPad pick up that font or will it default to something else? If they had embeded another font which isn't available on the iPad, say Plantin or something like that, what would happen on the iPad? Forgive my slowness but I haven't quite understood what happens."

Handling the rising ePub Tower of Device Babble

For the last year of so we have been making ePubs that have been dumbed down for products using Adobe ADE.  This is generally not a problem for formless content (explained well here) such as standard novels and general non-fiction, but becomes an issue with a lot of trade books that have definite content - content with well-defined form and layout, where layout and style really matters as part of the reading experience.