Using ePUB

How we make great ePubs

Making great ePubs is about attention to detail and not being the cheapest in town. There are two big voices in the ePub "noise-o-sphere" at the moment. Digitization outfits offering to do conversion cheaper and better, and trade book designers lamenting loosing typography and X-Y page layout. With these two themes dominating discussions, it is little wonder that the ePubs produced generally suck.

When you free yourself from both of these considerations, you can settle down and do some great e-content work. Digitization quality is a given requirement, e-books have much more going for them than page-like layout.

This post is about real information books not fiction and linear non-fiction which is somewhat pedestrian - compared to more information based content. This month alone we have processed e-books on the following subjects:

ePub-Print Simultaneous Design IV. Coming soon.

I am still compiling the list of Simultaneous Design guidelines but have been asked to give a preview of the subject material by several impatient readers. 

We have taken the  web document "This Dynamic Earth" and turned it into a textbook layout and ePub. This is a public domain resource available at  http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/dynamic.html

Here are a couple of sneak previews of the image. The pages are A4 (210mm x 296mm). The first image shows a two page spread of the title page for the print PDF produced using IGP:FLIP. On the left you can see the ePub title page version instantlly created in ePub. Here it is shown in in ADE. 

The following image is a sample PDF two page spread from the document interior.

The full SDIV design article will be ready shortly. Watch this space!

 

ePub-Print Simultaneous Design III.5. Format Capabilities Chart

While writing SD4 it struck me that I have a lot of experience making e-book formats for a very wide range of devices. We have been at it around the clock since 1999 after all. That analysis of devices by their features, behaviours, limitations and bugs is not something anyone understands intuitively until a lot of digital content water has passed by.

This references the earlier post on content type analysis for various format capabilities. Read this for more context for the chart. Simultaneous Design is a growing series and should be read in sequence.

I created this Format Selection Chart for people unfamiliar with the device quirk driven nature of the digital content production business, and to demonstrate that all e-book formats are not equal in their capabilities. The outcome is a Simultaneous Design decision matrix that can be referred while wrestling with the points, pixels, RGB's and CMYKs that are Simultaneous Design for Print and 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.