Using ePUB

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.

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!

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.

Syncronizing Print and ePub Design

We have just released a significant update for IGP:FLIP in general and IGP:FLIP Portals in particular. When you use IGP:Document Designer to create your print design, the same design features can be directly and automatically mapped to the ePub.

Of course there is a bit of algorithmic processing in between. (OK so its basic arithmetic. But what the heck, we really need to sound brilliant!).

Handling the rising ePub Tower of Device Babble

For the last year of so we have been making ePubs that have been dumbed down for products using Adobe ADE.  This is generally not a problem for formless content (explained well here) such as standard novels and general non-fiction, but becomes an issue with a lot of trade books that have definite content - content with well-defined form and layout, where layout and style really matters as part of the reading experience.

Poetry in iPad

Hurrah! Centre aligned poetry using display table and auto left and right margins looks great on iPad and behaves well. OK, admittedly that may not excite a lot of people, but we digitize a lot of poetry. Of all content types, the presentation of poetry is pre-eminent for expression, reading, and often understanding.

You can see a couple of screen grabs from one of our poetry test books in the extended entry.

IGP:FLIP Publisher Portals

Infogrid Pacific has released IGP:PublisherECMS Portals, including a fully featured IGP:FLIP, as a Software as a Service model for small and medium publishers. 
This means that any Publisher of any size can now take advantage of the most powerful XML digital production system available anywhere today from just US$99.00 per month.
IGP:FLIP allows the instant production of e-pubs from XML as well print PDF's and other e-book formats.
Other benefits include collaboration editing and production, convergence of front and back list XML, and most importantly, content produced in IGP:FLIP is ready for a digital future. 

For more information go to IGP:FLIP Publisher Portals, and start your XML digital content for the future strategy instantly, and affordably.