ePub-Print Simultaneous Design II

The first blog in this series introduced some of the challenges with designing for print and ePub at the same time. (The term Concurrent design has been changed to Simultaneous Design). This is a series of blogs that starts with a simple trade novel, and in future blogs adds value and moves on to  textbook style challenges and finally large scale remixable content creating multiple documents.

Here at Infogrid Pacific we regard ourselves as practitioners rather than prophets, and we work with the standards, delivery and fulfilment systems that are available, practical and real (no matter how much we are frustrated by their limitations).

E-books are here. So are devices - ADE, iPad, Nook, Kobo Mobi/Kindle and Googles yet to be announced mystery. Who knows what next year?

So is the larger concept of digital content.  People are accessing, purchasing and reading digital content. Digital content needs to be maintained as digital content and it needs digital content tools.  The biggest reason is money.

Typically publishers pay twice for their books. Once for the print design, and then again through some retro-digitization process from the PDF or hard copy. The result is cheap conversion driven by the e-book/sales value, or mucking around with a totally inappropriate desktop tool like InDesign, which gives a format, but no digital value.

The money facts are very easy to understand. A publisher pays $XX.xx for production of the high-touch, highly illustrated book, and then $X.xx for conversion of content to e-books. At the end of the process you have a PDF, an ePub, and maybe a half-baked Mobi for Kindle. You get digital formats (PDF is a digital format), but you don't have a digital publishing business.

Digital publishing should substantially lower the costs of production, not increase them. There is no future strategy creating ePubs from InDesign or some other desktop conversion tool, because what is missing is the value component, the digital content file - XML.

If you have the right tools, design for multi-formats takes only a small additional time increment, and the output is all formats simultaneously, optimized for their formats. In addition you have a database of XML ready for instant reuse at any time. 

I have to mention here that IGP:FLIP (Front List Interactive Publishing) is the solution available to do all of this. The rest of this blog will demonstrate how simultaneous design principles can be used to create optimized and multiple formats.

Simultaneous Design Sample One. A Simple Novel.

Simultaneous Format Design Plan

We are going to start this series with a simple Novel. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. It is going to be produced in two PDF versions - standard print plus Accessible Large Print for POD delivery, and an ePub.

The required outputs are a standard print PDF, an accessible large print PDF (for POD fulfilment) and a standard ePub. 

The final files can be accessed and downloaded here.

Process Overview

1. The book was imported from a Structure Styled *.doc manuscript. Preparing the manuscript for a straight-forward text like Siddhartha is about one hours work. This time varies depending on the number of sections, and extraneous styles.
2. The Structure Styled manuscript was imported into IGP:FLIP, and output formats were immediately available and styled to the default template design.
3. IGP:Document Designer was then used to set up the book print design. This took around 30 minutes.
4. A new Design Profile was created and IGP:Document Designer was again used to set up the Large Print book design. This also took around 30 minutes.
5. The formats you are looking at were generated using the rendering and format generation of IGP:FLIP. These took just seconds to generate and download.

Quick Print Specifications

Standard

1. Page: (A5) 149mm x 210mm
2. Bodytext: 12pt/16pt, NimbusNo9 Justified, hyphenated, 1 line.
3. Margins: Top - 56pt, Inside - 41pt, Outside - 90pt
4. Line-count: 26
5. Chapter openers: 9 lines, Title - 22pt/32pt, two lines above. Title block fills the 3rd and 4th lines.
6. This book has not had extensive tracking adjustments as it is a tutorial for simultaneous format design, not full production.

Oversize

1. Page: (A4) 210mm x 296mm
2. Bodytext: 16pt/20pt, ragged right, no hyphenation
3. Margins: Top - 72pt, Inside - 56pt, Outside - 144pt
4. Line-count: 35
5. Chapter openers: 10 lines, Title - 32pt/40pt, two lines above. Title block fills the 3rd and 4th lines.
6. This book has not had extensive tracking adjustments as it is a tutorial for simultaneous format design, not full production.

Reader Specification

Auto generated by IGP:Document Designer from the print specification

Style Design

IGP:Document Designer was used to create the page layout and text design for print. The standard print book uses the Van de Graff page construction method which is relatively generous in its use of margins, but produces a pretty page spread. The print page size is A5 (149mm x 210mm). The margins are collapsed completely in the ePub. The Large print edition uses a wide left margin but sacrifices bottom margin for paper efficiency. Again, margins are collapsed automatically in the ePub.

Typically an ePub can inherit well from a print design for aspects of font size relationships, colour and decorative elements such as backgrounds and borders when applied. Because the ePub should address the display capabilities of a wide range of devices, vertical spacing in particular should be reduced, and where used in print, negative margin properties set to zero in ePub. 

In the standard print book the chapter title block is nine lines. This is automatically calculated by IGP:Document Designer for the ePub to reduce the vertical spacing to the one you can see. 

Because the base page design used 40pt inside margin, and 90pt outside margin, the right-opening pages had a left margin adjustment of -30pt applied for the print version, and the copyright page a right margin adjustment of -30pt. If this got through to the e-book formats the result would generally be content that could be cut off in the margins. The negative margins are removed by IGP:Document Designer. The same applies to the oversize print PDF.

Flow Design

This book has no significant flow design considerations. The Half-title page was removed from the ePub with the Formats on Demand option.

Simple linear text of this nature has few issues when generated from XML for simultaneous multiple formats.

Summary

1. Simple interiors for novels and linear trade non-fiction are more easily produced using the power and capabilities of IGP:FLIP with IGP:Document Designer than any other method.
2. With experience and the right approach the production time for multiple print and electronic formats takes just a fraction of the time and cost of production using desktop applications such as InDesign.
3. The content is available as a highly reusable XML form as will be demonstrated in the next tutorial. This extends the value of the content into the future.
4. These demonstration print books have not had full tracking and hyphenation adjustments applied and has not been read by a proof editor. It is anticipated that proof editing corrections would add approximately one to two hours to the production time.

To view the files please access and download here. There are two Print PDFs available and two ePubs.

Then next instalment is value addition by remixing in other content to the novel, and applying more advanced styles including images and colour.

Comments

[Matt]

Interesting article, this is a great topic to debate/discuss.

As far as money facts - digital publishing should decrease production costs IF your print product goes away or is replaced by POD (providing your happy with many of the restrictions and quality issues with POD) so I would ask you; what does this XML based solution cost? What are the up front costs and costs of implementation, training, and ingestion of all old assets in various formats?

I would disagree with the assessment of Adobe InDesign. For the money and considering most publishers already own it, have trained staff running it, it IS a REAL, PRACTICAL, solution in comparison with the costs of an XML based solution.

Would love to hear some more money facts and transparency regarding this XML solution, because I do agree that, in theory, XML is ideal.

Look forward to your demos on tackling more design intensive ePubs.

[Richard Pipe]

I think the costing analysis is a good request. I don't knock InDesign as a tool, only that it creates terminal formats, and does not give a digital strategy.

If the need for tomorrow is streaming HTML5 to apps or browsers, it is going to stop being able to be delivered. The problem with this visionary tomorrow statement is most publishers haven't got their head around ePub, let alone the undefined future.

Our XML solution IGP:FLIP starts at $99.00 per month for the SaaS model. http://www.infogridpacific.com/igp/IGP:FLIP%20Portals/. A full site license is of course considerably more and I can't let that out in public here for obvious reasons.

The one think I have learned about upfront costs and training is that North America is more expensive than, for example, Europe or Asia. There is a different attitude towards "just doing it". I would go so far as to say that change management inertia has become institutionalized in North America. So this ends up being the fuzziest cost area. I of course say it costs nothing, its easy-peasy; you would possibly say a trillion or so!

Thanks for the challenge on money facts. I may ask you for some current costs or examples for real world samples if you are in a position to assist. Typesetting costs vary wildly around the world and by publisher. I know trade novel publishers paying US$8.00 per page for stuff that should cost 1.50 per page... But I am not sure the argument is the design cost really, damn good designers/compositors/editors should be paid appropriately no matter what tool they use, its total cost of ownership and ability for dynamic change in a rapidly self-publishing world.

Our XML solution is transparent. Check out the big concept videos here. http://www.infogridpacific.com/igp/IGP:FLIP%20Portals/Tutorials%20and%20Demos/

All things going well, Simultaneous Design III or IV will be up today or tomorrow to take this discussion forward.

[Matt]

Thanks for the constructive response Richard.

Good point on HTML5 and positioning for future shifts. Agreed, most publishers are still struggling with ePub, and are hesitant to invest/commit to current format trends.

I think the big struggle for providers of XML solutions for publishing is selling those key points I made (total investment costs, learning curves, implementation).....tough to gauge the learning curve and implementation piece, as this has so much to do with the organization and its ability embrace this type of change/shift, as you point out, it does have a lot to do with attitude.