This little analysis is a guide for publishers who are beyond mainstream fiction, and is a quick introduction to the differences, problems and possibilities of various content in e-book contexts.
Here content means text, noteboxes, notes, sidebars, images, charts, tables, forms and any other content beyond the galley text flow.
The release of the iPad has encouraged a lot of publishers to try and get their non-fiction books into ePub. Not many authors are writing books for "e" yet, and not many publishers are designing for "e". Therefore most commercial e-books are generated by backward digitization from PDF or print source material.
All books are not equal. There is a wide range of genres each of which has different values in the context of print and/or e-books, or vice versa.
The following list represents production genres with various layout, presentation and complexity issues. The list is not exhaustive, but is a general guide to e-book usefulness of any specific design genre, and the differences that need to be considered between the print and e-book version.
- Fiction
- Non-fiction story
- Non-fiction event/fact
- Academic
- Reference
- Life-style
- How to
- Cooking/food
- Travel
Many of the books in the presentation category make excellent e-books. In many cases they can be better and more useful as e-books than their print counterpart if sufficient effort goes into the interpretation and flow. They can also contain more, different and richer information than their print counterparts. I am ignoring high-interactivity and multimedia in this analysis.
The Analyse
Each of the genres in the list are evaluated on the following four terms. E-book generally means ePub, not a programmed Book App.
Translates to e-book: Does a print book in this genre translate to a good or useful e-book.
E-book production effort: How much effort is required to process the print content for e-book use. This is strictly relative and very general, but is an indication of the base cost of production.
E-book presentation design effort: What difference between print and e-books could or should be required. How much is or should the e-design effort be.
E-book flow design effort: Does the book require extensive content interpretation from an X-Y page layout to a useful e-book that exploits available e-book presentation tools. This is where well crafted e-books can really take off, but it has to be designed and planned.
The analysis considers a general e-book/ePub that the publisher would like to make available on the widest range of devices, including desktop readers, rather than a bespoke application or book created for a single device.
Fiction
Perhaps the most debated e-book genre, but also the one that needs least debate.
Translates to e-book: Very well
E-book production effort: Low. It's paragraphs and chapter openers.
E-book presentation design effort: Low. Inherits from print. May have some ornaments.
E-book flow design effort: Low. Some publishers like to play with the TOC sequence.
Non-fiction
This is the auto/biography, reveal all category of book. In this classification system the books may have some notes, and no index. It may have a bibliography and a little back matter and a few photos. Just a little step up from the novel.
Translates to e-book: Very well
E-book production effort: Low. Paragraphs, chapter openers and a few links and structures.
E-book presentation design effort: Low. Inherits from print. May have some alternative text styles.
E-book flow design effort: Low. Same as fiction, with some reverse links here and there.
Non-fiction event/Fact
This is a very interesting category. For those who purchase and read them, they are definitely the sort of book that remains on the shelf for life, and is probably not loaned. They either give information for personal interest, or research. This is architecture, history, psychology, philosophy, etc.
Translates to e-book: Well. As a linear read. Not so well for a reference dip read unless the device supports strong bookmarking.
E-book production effort: Low to Medium. It paragraphs, chapter openers and a few links and structures.
E-book presentation design effort: Low. Inherits from print, may be some issues with plate pages, and sequences.
E-book flow design effort: Medium. some flow reinterpretation may be required. For example book end-notes moved as section end notes to address device performance limitations.If the book has an Index this will generally be well worth linking at least to the original page reference position.
Academic
Academic content went digital a long time ago. I started the Taylor and Francis multi-format conversion of 20,000 books back in 2000. More and more, academic articles don't make it to paper at all. They are easier to search, read and reference online. Initiatives like DOI, etc. make e-book referencing easier. (We are leaving STM out of this analysis as equations and formulas have their own set of issues.) Academic backlists are very large, and e-books can keep long slow sellers available forever.
Translates to e-book: Very well. As a linear read and as a linked section read. Becomes more effective with good bookmarks and annotations in a device.
E-book production effort: Medium-high. Depending on the intensity of notes, footnotes, figures, tables, charts, references, indexes, multiple-tocs, etc.
E-book presentation design effort: Low. Inherits
from print or highly standardized design for simple high-speed reading. Figures and tables are always numbered and referenced. There may be some issues with plate pages, and large tables or very detailed lineart.
Reference
This is a large genre dominated by dictionaries, thesauruses, atlases and other specialist look-up content.
Translates to e-book: Not Well. Very variable results depending on the type of material. The main problem is not content, but format and device limitations.
E-book production effort: High. Generally very dense structures and links if it is to be of value. Link density brings limited capability devices to their knees.
E-book presentation design effort: Low to Medium. Generally repetitive and pattern based.
Life-style
This is the general production genre for exercise & fitness, beauty, pets, sports, hobbies and everything else where authors want to share some form of interest or expertise in a lifestyle domain.The books are characterized by a lot of images, many in instructional or demonstration sequences. A lot of the images and graphical elements can be flow breakers. The book will have distinctive Headers, note boxes, and colour. If it is monochrome, there may be a large colour plate section at the back.
Translates to e-book: Badly to very well. Adequate for general devices. Well on a device specific basis. Very well with appropriate re-design.
E-book production effort: High to Very High. Image preparation, table splitting, lots of specialist structures, and even semantics to be handled. There are always a thousand little details to be handled.
E-book presentation design effort: Medium to high. The style themes can generally inherit from print, monochrome should have colour introduced. Gray images should be colour. There may be a number of highlighted structures that have to be redesigned. Colour has to be carefully considered and tested for sufficient contrast on eInk devices while maintaining the look for colour devices.
E-book flow design effort: High. Extensive interpretation of content and restructuring required. Note boxes and sidebars have to be repositioned in the flow, as do images, and image sequences. To be done well needs input from the publisher, and/or the author in some cases.
How to
This genre ranges from the relative simplicity of an Idiot's Guide... style of book, through detailed instruction manuals on every conceivable subject; usually with lots of reference charts, materials charts, and other supporting information and of course lavishly illustrated art and craft books. Gardening books can't be forgotten.
Translates to e-book: Variable. The result is usually very device and environment specific.
E-book production effort: Medium to high.Extensive image and background preparation, cleaning up and optimizing call-outs, defining placement sequences.
E-book presentation design effort: Medium to High. Inherits from print, but generally demands colour value addition in e-books. Images should be coloured. Images may need to be re-drawn, re-sequenced or have other processing to make them useful
in multiple devices. If the original had gray line art, seriously consider a duotone approach.
E-book flow design effort: High. Usually linear by nature. Eg. Starting from the basics and building up to advanced issues. e-books can have substantial additional information. Subject, information and sttructure linking should be a lot better than is usually created for a print book.
Cooking/food
Cook books and general food/diet books are a very large genre, generally with high production values. They are high-touch books, and are generally keepers.
Translates to e-book: Well. Great for browsing, good for reference, can be used when shopping as well.
E-book production effort: Medium to high. This can become very high if the publisher wants detailed recipe tagging for content extraction. Additional metadata can be helpful for classification.
E-book presentation design effort: Medium to High. Images are important in cookbooks and give both appeal attraction and presentation hints to the cook. Black and white images hardly work in a device. Colour only here please. Books often have section colour themes which add to the value on a device with colour, but needs careful contrast checking for monochrome devices.
E-book flow design effort: Low to Medium. Generally divided into logical parts with lists of recipes. Can have supplementary information such as measurement tables, nutrition facts, etc. which may be linkable. Depending on the book, an additional ingredients index is useful.
Travel
Travel books made it into various e-formats a long time ago. It is important that the digital content is highly structured, classified and has very strong metadata. Travel content is highly maintained and must be created in, and maintained from an environment that allows that to happen. Ideally the content can be assembled into custom books.
Translates to e-book: Very well
E-book production effort: Medium to high. Lots of detailed XML and needs really good semantic tagging or supplementary metadata per item.
E-book presentation design effort: Medium to High.
Structure is way more important than styles. But once the structure is in place presentation can be highly creative and create a radically different e-device experience. If the content is moved to different contexts (online, remixed to a new book), new styles should be able to be just dropped on.
E-book flow design effort: Medium to High. For a static book, the effort is organization by place and venue/type, etc. However travel content should NEVER be produced unless it is designed to be easily reused in remix environments.
Concurrent Design and Production
Generally a publisher ships us books and asks what can be done. A lot can be done, but converting rich, highly designed print books into e-books that deliver the same, more, or format optimized end-user value as the print books, needs a minimum set of change and modification decisions.
Digitization of complex books cannot be done effectively on a fixed page rate with a cheap production line mentality. It is better to leave them as print only books than create e-books which are a dim shadow of the original.
The ideal and optimal approach is to design both e-books and print books at the same time. This is the specific strength of IGP:FLIP with IGP:Document Designer. This is never going to happen with desktop typesetting applications because the XML is only a layer, and there is no core content value.
For example it is very difficult to get a half-way decent novel ePub out of InDesign let alone simultaneous format optimized design and content.
Concurrent design means some combination of the following. This list is not exhaustive:
Book text design: Black or grayscale for print, always colour for e-books.
Images 1: Monochrome option for print, always colour for e-books (unless it is a book about monochrome art of course).
Images 2: Images with more detail than can be handled in a device have at least links to external views to allow device zooming features to be used in their browsers. Stanza is particularly good at this in the iPhone.
Images 3: Print page spreads manage the print and format image presentation simultaneously.
Images 4: Back of book colour plate sections are integrated into the book content for e-books.
Indexes: Optimized for e-book to make their linking relevant. Print stays the same.
Additional linked structures: More content relevant link lists in the e-books. These can be at the section level or any content relevant position.
Format optimization of data structures. Large tables, extreme XY structures optimized for the print page are either tagged for multi-format production, or have substitute web page versions.
Strategies for format specific objects: Eg. Print books can have forms, fill-in charts and notes pages. These can (and should be) be linked and printable external resources for e-books.
There will always be books that cannot, will not and should not be all formats. There are highly defined art pages that certainly don't translate directly into the devices of today.
So the options seem to be:
1. Keep designing for print. Let the e-books be a derivative of print and all its page metaphors and keep the Indian conversion facilities happy.
2. Design separately for print, e-books and even devices using different tools and expensive strategies like "XML First".
Use common dynamic XML content and design for separate format requirements simultaneously in a collaborative environment. Also include format specific value add content. That's IGP:FLIP (Front List Interactive Publishing) of course.
Great post. will book mark this site thanks Dan
Posted by: books for ipad | 17 May 2011 at 05:36 PM