My talk during the 'Love Learning' Seminars at the London Book Fair 2013, had a large audience. If any of you are reading this - apologies that I over-ran my time slot and skipped over a few slides towards the end!
So much to say on this topic - hard to fit into a 50 minite slot.
Note: I presented from a PDF inside the iBooks app on the iPad. Just sweeping through the slides but double-tapping to enlarge images within the pages. This seems a very visually rich way to present and being already inside the iBooks app means that we can demonstrate eBooks from the library easily. There is less control than with Keynote. I did use Keynote to create the presentation but then exported out to PDF.
I post here a PDF of the slides. Audio will be added when I can get round to editing this in a few days.
Fixed layout eBooks in ePUB3 are currently supported best with on the iPad. Yes, there are other ways of viewing, but the iPad seems to provide the best user experience.
Many publishers use InDesign somewhere in the process of creating print books.
How can we make use of InDesign to build fixed-layout eBooks?
The step-by-step guide will show how to use InDesign, to begin the process of building fixed-layout eBook. You will also need to be able to edit the CSS and other files inside the ePUB package.
[Edit] Please note that InDesign CC 2014 does now include a means to export to Fixed-Layout ePub, although the markup produced is very complex and is very difficult to edit.
Edit: This article has been updated to take account of Indesign CC.
Note: The information provided here applies to eBooks created with the ePub3 standard. The font embedding techniques herein will only work properly if the ePub validates to the ePub3 standard.
Different devices offer different fonts, which may not be under the control of the book designer.
The iPad is the most sophisticated tablet that has a lot of built-in fonts, and these are available to the ebook designer.
When exporting to ePub from InDesign you can specify that the fonts are embedded.
InDesign CS6 CreativeCloud will encrypt the fonts using a method acceptable for the ePUB3 standard recognised by the International Digital Publishers Forum(IDPF). Unfortunately, the font files are also obvuscated and this is not acceptable to some eReaders.
Naturally enough, fonts embedded from the InDesign export to ePub3, will display correctly in Adobe Digital Editions. But what about getting these fonts to display on the Apple iOS devices, such as the iPad?
When it comes to the display of text in your re-flowable eBook, you have a some choices about hyphens.
Some general points
Hyphens can be useful to break up long words across the line break. This is particularly appropriate if you want to justify your text, since the renderer will need to space words out, and this can lead to uncomfortable spacing! But you need to adhere to the following rules:
Don't justify headings. This is because they may not span the line, and so you are going to get horrid space between the words.
Don't hyphenate the headings
Don't justify your verse
Only hyphenate if you are justifying the text and the line width (measure) is relatively short.
Designers who work within publishing companies are often frustrated with the results when their beautifully crafted print books are converted to eBooks. Particularly if they are flowable eBooks, that can have their viewing modes and fonts changed by the user.
This eBook focuses on revealing some features that can be implemented in flowable eBooks, in order to improve the aesthetic qualities of the juxtaposition of text and image on the page.
When building a Shakespeare play as a re-flowable ePUB3, one important design choice will be the display of the character names in relation to the words they speak.
In published works of the play this varies a lot and you can see here how the play was presented in the first folio.
The real issue for us is to try to achieve the arrangment of elements using InDesign, so that a print version may be possible as well as an eBook version from the same file. So what are the options?
At last, after 30 years, my book of photographs of Standing Stones and Stone Circles around the British Isles is now available as a fixed-format eBook and is on the Apple iBookstore.
Apple took several weeks to review the book, but I am pleased to say that it is currently on 50 stores worldwide!
