Using ePUB

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!

Syncronizing Print and ePub Design

We have just released a significant update for IGP:FLIP in general and IGP:FLIP Portals in particular. When you use IGP:Document Designer to create your print design, the same design features can be directly and automatically mapped to the ePub.

Of course there is a bit of algorithmic processing in between. (OK so its basic arithmetic. But what the heck, we really need to sound brilliant!).