Using ePUB

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 and MORE ePub Best Practices

Apple have released an ePub guideline - Recommendations - they call it. Thankfully just one and a half pages on preparing ePubs for the iPad. Mostly it addresses their particular set of device limitations. 

The iPad is a game changer, insofar as the rendering and presentation quality is excellent. The paper page metaphor is too strong for my taste but for a paged reader, the CSS implementation far ahead of ADE. This means their is no need to create crappy CSS for a particular device; and the XHTML and CSS is more future ready.

We have a standard test-book which has to be stylistically dumbed down for the quirky display properties and bugs in ADE and those devices that inherit ADE. Things are move lively on iPad. The sample screen grab here shows images sized by CSS and floated left.

The recommendations are mostly common sense and straight-forward.There are a number of screen-grabs of our Trade test book included showing the presentation of various structures.

ePub Validation Best Practices - OPF First

This is a new category that I want to blog about. I have had some agonies over whether to show files that are not in the OPF. Liza Daly clarified this with her Bookworm ePub check recommendations that make a lot of sense in terms of compliance vs. reader behaviour.

1. Case 1, where the file is declared in the OPF but is not in the package. Display what can be displayed. Issue a warning - There are files in the OPF that are missing in this ePub package. 
2. Case 2, where the file is in the package but is missing from the OPF. Display what can be displayed if anything but do not display/use files that are not in the OPF. Issue a warning - This package appears to be incomplete. It contains files that are not listed in the OPF. 

We will wait to see if we will give a list of files at this stage.

Because ePub is a collection of Internet technologies, a lot of files can be referred to from the XHTML and could display where a reader is based on technologies like WebKit (which AZARDI is). However there are some which are not always so easy to handle such as fonts, SVG, XML Islands and objects.