Using ePUB

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!

ePub-Print Simultaneous Design IV. Coming soon.

I am still compiling the list of Simultaneous Design guidelines but have been asked to give a preview of the subject material by several impatient readers. 

We have taken the  web document "This Dynamic Earth" and turned it into a textbook layout and ePub. This is a public domain resource available at  http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/dynamic.html

Here are a couple of sneak previews of the image. The pages are A4 (210mm x 296mm). The first image shows a two page spread of the title page for the print PDF produced using IGP:FLIP. On the left you can see the ePub title page version instantlly created in ePub. Here it is shown in in ADE. 

The following image is a sample PDF two page spread from the document interior.

The full SDIV design article will be ready shortly. Watch this space!

 

e-Book-Print Concurrent Design and Production

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.