Using ePUB

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.

e-Book-Print Concurrent Design and Production

This little analysis is a guide for publishers who are beyond mainstream fiction, and is a quick introduction to the differences, problems and possibilities of various content in e-book contexts.

Here content means text, noteboxes, notes, sidebars, images, charts, tables, forms and any other content beyond the galley text flow.

The release of the iPad has encouraged a lot of publishers to try and get their non-fiction books into ePub. Not many authors are writing books for "e" yet, and not many publishers are designing for "e". Therefore most commercial e-books are generated by backward digitization from PDF or print source material. 

All books are not equal. There is a wide range of genres each of which has different values in the context of print and/or e-books, or vice versa.

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!).

ePub Image Test Cases

This is a set of image presentation options for ePad in general and iPad in particular.

We live in a world where the screens range from the tiny to huge, and aspect ratios vary widely. Image handling in digital content should address the widest number of delivery environments. There are a number of recommendations on sizing images for different device screen, but little guidance on how to make images work for all of them.

Static images, made to some X-Y size are inherently device specific, and often  disappointing in different sized reading contexts. The approach we take is to use a simple little XHTML structure and CSS resizing to make the image proportional to the devices screen size. This works well most of the time. Images can be made larger - thinking of a wider range of devices - while performing under control in a document irrespective of screen size.

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!

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!

Embedded Fonts in ePub for iPad

We are still getting questions from publishers about the whole embedded fonts in ePubs and iPad. For example:

"Will an epub with embedded fonts be an issue or not? I'm assuming that on the Sony eReader (ADE) it will display fine, but will it cause a problem with the iPad. The font the designers have used is Sabon, so will the iPad pick up that font or will it default to something else? If they had embeded another font which isn't available on the iPad, say Plantin or something like that, what would happen on the iPad? Forgive my slowness but I haven't quite understood what happens."

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.

iPad Cover Presentation Tests

There are all sorts of blogs stating that the "cover is no-longer the book" with ePubs. That state hasn't arrived yet. The retro-look iPad wood-grain bookshelf with rows of books maintains the importance of the cover. And so it should (just drop the Ikea furniture). These covers are generated from the ePub. If it is all tagged inside the ePub in accordance with the Apple requirements it shows. If not, it doesn't. Other blogs have covered this issue. Here's a link to Mike Cane's iPad test blog which yells about it.

So far all the books we have seen on "the shelf", have been normal form factor. We generated a few covers with different sizes and aspect ratios to see what would happen, and of course to make sure they display.