Using ePUB

Long live Digital Publishing

A lot happens in two years, and blogging on about ePubs is a bit of a dead end.

To celebrate 2011 this blog will no longer be used. Digital Publishing is the exciting new avatar and addresses larger digital content issues for publishers. The focus is still on the practical, but with more business strategy orientation and some advice on how to go beyond ePubs with digital content.

Thank you to all who have stopped by, and especially those who have made a comment or two.

Digital Content in the Wild

I haven't blogged quite some time. The excuse is work, lots of it. But very interesting work.

Getting IGP:Distribution Manager deployed and working in a number of locations and languages; designing methods for large scale ePub production of art and heavily illustrated books; improving the subtleties of online typography in IGP:FLIP; and the intensity of creating the specification and software design for IGP:Content Fulfilment Systems with AZARDI II - have all taken a lot of clock cycles.

This post is not so much about ePubs, but what to do with the ePubs once they have been produced and our experiences with just that. 

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.

Surviving the Transition to Digital Publishing

Phil Spinelli and I have recently been discussing the rapidly changing publishing scene with the uptake and pressures on publishers, brought about by rise of digital content. Phil consults with a number of publishers and helps them to understand the mindset changes needed to make the transition to digital, and more importantly what they have to do at a practical level to "go digital".

Phil has an amazing 12 point guide titled "Survive the Transition to Digital Publishing". He uses this to help publishers quickly grasp why digital is important, and how to change their thinking, and business strategies. He has kindly given me permission to post it here on the blog.

The 12 points take a practical how-to, action-plan, focused approach that is generally missing in digital publishing discussions.