Using ePUB

Dirty Little Hacks in ePub

Epub is epub and devices are devices. With iPad ignoring text-align: center; there is a lot of extra work going on out there to put in substitute elements to make ePub work with devices. Every new device presents new "challenges". 

The most common hack to overcome this iPad problem is to introduce a blank <span> statement into the paragraph. It can be a lot of work and looks like this:

<p class="center-me"><span>I am text that wants to be centered</span></p>

ePub-Print Simultaneous Design III

The business scenario for Simultaneous Design II  was taking simple trade book manuscript to a print PDF and ePub into some distribution channels. SDIII brings some of Phil Spinelli's Surviving the Transition to Digital guide into practical relevance. This post addresses the first three "Surviving" points:

1. Digital Publishing requires a different Editorial perspective ...

We are creating a collectors edition of the first book, with additional content. We will do a marketing push using ePub first. If it does well we may consider a print version. This gives us very low production costs, and lets us evaluate the business potential of the new edition.

2. Digital publishing requires a different Production perspective ...

We have already put the book out as a standard novel. This time we are increasing the design components and adding more content to move it beyond the novel and into the special interest category.

3. Digital Publishing requires a different Archiving perspective ...

The digital content for the book we are working on is already in IGP:FLIP and available for instant XML value-add action.

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.

iPad CSS Serious Fun with Noteboxes

After a week of stressful hyphens, we thought it was time to play with the fluffy parts of ePub for iPad. The agenda was of course to see what extras could be wrung out of iPad using extended CSS features.

Please remember, we are not saying this should be done, the exercise is to discover what can be done. However for non-fiction trade publishers this does open up interesting value propositions. Where a book can only be done in gray because of printing costs, the ePub could reflect a higher level of design  including colour and design elements not available in print.This was eerily reminiscent of our earlier exercise making flashcards. 

Hyphenation in ePub Continued

Just to keep the saga on typography in iPad moving, I created a few simple test cases to see what happened. The results speak for themselves (except I cannot resist some comments of course).

So this is typically long-winded and a bit specialist. If you are interested in typography in ePub devices... read on!