Using ePUB

ANNOUNCEMENT: e-Content for Asia

With the amazing help and cooperation of an IGP:Portal Partner we have now got CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) working in IGP:FLIP. That means the benefits of simultaneous production of print PDF, Online Content and ePubs is exactly the same for Asian ideographs as for Western European languages. The considerations:

1. Your fonts must be Unicode (they will be huge but can be simplified or traditional).
2. The CJK will  be left to right. No top down right to left sorry.
3. If you are making an ePub your e-Reader device must be Asian language empowered, but that is generally not an issue for a Sony Reader.

That means we now officially support: 

1. All Western and Eastern European languages: Latin, Greek Cyrillic
2. All CJK languages: Chinese, Japanese and Korean
3. All Indic scripts

That just leaves Thai, Arabic and Hebrew to round out the trickiest aspects of rendering and working with the languages of the world.

Of course this doesn't mean devices or readers support all these languages. But if you create the content, maybe the knob brigade will bring the readers.If they don't we go HTML5 and Android.

The only language we have really left to conquer is the ever challenging MathML, the ultimate lingua franca.

Simple ePub OPS rules for Apple

This is a sardonic post. That means is is disdainfully or ironically humorous; scornful and mocking. While it is serious, it attempts to do it with some touch of humour. My apologies if you don't get it.

Document and book content are not web pages. That is because eBooks are designed for people with an attention span, who have decided to read a whole book and probably want to spend more time reading than playing with the knobs.

It is emerging as a statistical probability that no Adobe or Apple programmer has ever actually read a book on their respective devices. I mean something with more than 20,000 words without pictures.

A smart device producer would expose the rules they use to the world, so producers can make explicit decisions.Obviously the sages at "Adobe of the mud hut" or "Apple of the fruit bowl" are not particularly smart in a user experience way when it comes to actual reading. They both have very loose edges when it comes to the OPS even though it is based on the second best browser in the world (just to start a fight).  

The recent fiasco with the release of iBookstore 1.1 which now displays PDFs boringly and has the new user controlled justification feature, also known as the LAYOUT DESTROYER obviously needs serious action. It appears to have fallen on me to sort the whole darn mess out.

I have therefore written a simple User Story so the folks at Infinite Loop can stop going in infinite circles, and can grasp the basic set of rules that will give users control AND allow authors, editors and designers to create pretty darn hot ePubs.

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.

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!

A Digital Content Senior Statesman

I have just had the "experience" of creating my very first YouTube video. This epic is on creating ePubs and PDFs from a structure styled manuscript using IGP:FLIP, our real-groove digital content publishing platform (Yes! I am allowed to say "real groovy", because of my senior statesman status). As a person who occupies the "not young" part of the digital trend curve, this can only be regarded as a major achievement.

I have been using the Internet for business and various customers since 1996 and always regarded it (the Internet) as a three steps backward environment when it comes to real interactive stuff (HTML5 Canvas is changing the landscape!). It has taken me four years as an account holder to actually upload a video to YouTube!

Extended Characters and Embedded Fonts

To handle certain East European and other languages (Eg. Maori), we have been forced to use embedded fonts with ADE.We generally use a free licensed font which has a wide set of characters such as Gentium. Rather than embed the whole font, we usually create a specific sub-set of characters to keep the file size to a minimum.

The scary part of iPad announcing no embedded fonts support was how did it handle at least the basic extended Latin sets. On the next page you can see our quick and nasty Entities Test Book images which show iPad coming out well (thankfully). Their basic fonts at least support an extended range of necessary and useful characters.

We are also doing an embedded fonts test to see how iPad handles them, hopefully by just ignoring them. If this works we will still keep embedding font sub-sets for ADE if we want to read anything other than English West Europe languages and Malay, and hopefully iPad will just ignore the embedded fonts. I like comparing these on Lucidor as well as it uses the Gecko rendering engine and has the best presentation options available in any e-pub reader.

You can see the images of the entities test results on the next page.

E-pub or XHTML?

Given the current state of content related technologies there is little doubt that e-pub, and any e-book format is a transient thing. The world of content technology is moving fast and it has to be asked what does a standards e-book format deliver? E-pub is about to go into specification round two. It's going to take 18 months apparently, but a lot is going to happen in that time.

ePub Best Practices 2010

We sometimes get asked "do we follow the Adobe ePub best practices guide?". Our answer is "we have our own ePub best practices guides which have been formulated producing a lot more content than the authors of the Adobe guide.

The Adobe best practices was written two years ago. It specifically addresses an Adobe viewpoint of ePub and are showing their age, except where they apply to reader/device limitations. Having said that, most of the Adobe guide is pretty much simple common sense but oriented to trade novel type documents. There is a lot more content out there!

Because ADE (Adobe Digital Editions) is possibly the most widely distributed ePub reader to date, and the one with the best DRM support, we live with it and have to compromise ePub production to live with its limitations.

When we create ePubs for publishers new to ePub and devices we get the same set of questions about why e-pubs look and behave the way they do. Here is some practical information from the e-pub production coal-face.

Kindle. The Curse of E-Books

With Amazon releasing Kindle internationally, e-book strategies have been set back a decade and once more the e-book production quality bar has been moved into the mud. Mediocre e-books of all types can now be purchased internationally by all, and probably publishers and e-book aficionados will be grateful to Amazon.

I am a bit sad about this, and was always glad that the unavailability of the Kindle internationally, and restrictive international distribution deals, constrained the Kindle STD to American shores. Now we all get the opportunity to catch it.

Fortunately e-book standards have come a long way since 1999. E-pub has virtually no restrictions on layout and styling, within the constraints of reflow, which means some pretty neat books can be created.

There is even an emerging e-book designer skill set developing, we like to think we are in the vanguard here. There are some very exciting trade books being produced, suitable for on-the-go reading and reference and sometimes, with some content, the e-book is more valuable to the user than the print book.

Amazon - Sirloin to Mincemeat

Of course in its market wind-up Amazon did the con job and said to publishers send in your e-pubs and we will automatically convert them to Kindle - we have the technology! its supports the IDPF 1.0 and IDPF 2.0 epub format.

Now for those in the know, there have been many complaints about the nasty conversions Mobigen does. Realistically that is the nature of a free conversion utility. You get exactly what you pay for.  If e-pub books are made well, they will never convert to Mobipocket (aka Kindle) using the lousy convertor. And they shouldn't for a lot of reasons.

AZARDI Twitters

A couple of Twitters floating around about AZARDI. Took note of the comment about "allegedly will only read conformant ePubs (good luck with that)". Thanks for the good wishes.

Allegedly is probably about the right word in this release. We will be working hard to turn allegedly into an em dash as soon as possible. After all, is it an ePub if it isn't conformant?