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:
- Fiction and linear non-fiction
- Fern classification and identification
- Fishing spots
- Concise Encyclopedia
- Facts-about books
- National Parks guide
- Crustacea and Insects
- Frogs and reptiles
- Gardening books
- Cook books
- Feminist history and bios
- Natural childbirth
- Horsemanship (including groovy full body navigation images)
- Diet and eating
- Comic illustrated short stories
- Deep Sea Fishing
- Deer and Pig hunting
- Sports almanacs.
- Drug misuse rehabilitation guides
To do this and hit the highest quality outputs means content has to go through a process which is more than digitization and more than layout. It needs full publisher involvement, experience and care for the end-user - the reader, more than the process.
We often recommend that books are NOT converted to e-books where the print treatment is too specific or the content is very hard copy. We often get over-ruled as well. There is also a considerable body of content that best spends its life digitally and never goes near paper.
The required approach with information heavy books means real engagement with the content at a number of levels. Well produced print books give the digital book designer a lot of clues on how to treat the e-book, especially when the subject expertise voice comes through clearly.
Document Analysis
The first step is looking at the general presentation of the content, layout and overall design. There are a number of standard things that can be done with most content to improve the e-book value, but of course cost is always important.
As one publisher said "we want a return, not just valuable XML sitting on a hard-drive. We don't have an open chequebook!" That is of course the publishers job, but they need the right information to make the decision. How many e-books can be sold to justify the production cost is the publisher's job. (This is where simultaneous design can considerably reduce the print/e-book cost model).
The treatment analysis has to take into account the real-world downstream sales factors where it can. But if there is a mismatch between costs, value and sales, the hard decisions have to be taken. At least these should be made on the basis of good information. A major benefit of a well designed e-book is there are no remainders. This step is where the decision is made on whether it will/can/should be turned into an e-book.
Information Analysis
This is probably the biggest step and is where design refactoring is carried out when appropriate or needed. It means understanding the content subject matter within the book context (difficult sometimes), understanding what the author/publisher were trying to achieve with the print book, and the experience to know what can be done to make the e-book an equal or better experience. Basically it means reading the book, or at least looking at it page by page to find out where things will go wrong, and what can be done to make a compelling content engagement experience.
This includes context of topics with images (where do the images go, what size and aspect ratio should they be, what navigation strategies can improve content engagement and discovery, does the refactoring improve the usefulness of the book and the reader's enjoyment, will the e-book be improved with the addition of colours, and what colours.
Image Analysis
For the types of books being discussed here, images are a critical part of the communication. In many the images are the most important thing. Book flow design, especially image/text relationships, often needs to be reinterpreted from print layout to e-book. Map reference layouts, "rectangularizing" vertical and ad-hoc layouts, and making sure captions are where they should be. For example, the caption at the bottom is not always the most sensible place for in a complex e-book.
The Business
Once all of that is done the production pricing is generated, with the full treatment proposal. This is submitted to the publisher.Where there is a lot of refactoring and image conformance we strongly recommend that the publisher has a preview version created demonstrating all of the treatments proposed. This is good for both parties as it clarifies the refactoring recommendations and the new values can be clearly seen and possibly modified.
With this type of work we frequently get asked "what can be done with this". A straight-forward e-Pub version of a print book hardly ever works with an e-Pub in information genres, and effective information design can open up new user experiences and quality of information communication.
Because everything is created in IGP:FLIP it is instantly XML and the flexibility to generate different navigation structures is built in. Creating superior books is considerably lower cost than it would be with manual tagging production methods. Add in IGP:Document Designer which lets design components be finely crafted and it is straight-forward to create e-books of high calibre.
For content that is inherently topic based (and nearly all trade self-help, reference and similar content is; explicitly or implicitly) XML production into a topic based format yields two immediate benefits.
- The content can be maintained in a single trusted environment for future versions, editions or use. It can also be extended for future e-editions without worrying about page count. Where a subject is specialist, this can be important for the long-term value of the content. Of course the maintained content is also always available for print.
- The topics can be reused in other books (easily using the IGP:FLIP Remix feature).
One warning note on extensive linking. It always has to be handled carefully if the target is general reader devices. They tend not to like too many links due to low processor power and limited memory. Therefore that encyclopaedia with 25,000 relevant links is probably going to grind to a halt on an eInk device.
Comments