It also gives publishers more control over distribution. And their ability to easily deliver updated content makes them attractive to magazine and newspaper publishers.
There is a rapidly-expanding selection of tools to produce enhanced ebooks. Adobe and Apple offer software that you install on your PC or Mac but a fast-growing category of newcomers operate entirely online via your web browser, no local software required. We look in more detail at the various options in the Production module. Most book and magazine publishers today use Adobe InDesign as their main page layout application.
Adobe has developed its Digital Publishing Suite primarily for magazine and other periodical publishers but it will suit some enhanced ebook publishing projects, especially for publishers already using Adobe InDesign for their book production. Apple has produced a free program called iBooks Author to create rich media ebooks for the Apple iPad.
It runs on a Macintosh computer and makes it easy to produce highly-designed ebooks, even by non-technical users, such as authors and teachers. Apple has aimed Author at the textbook market but it will work for any ebook with a complex design or for multimedia. Apple allows publishers to distribute free editions of ebooks produced with Author but, if they want to sell them, they must go through the Apple iBookstore. While this is restrictive, Apple is a big player in the consumer and education markets, and its iBooks 2 format and Author creation tool can produce high-quality illustrated works, making it attractive for many ebook projects.
Here are a couple of tips to help you decide. If you plan to produce some enhanced ebooks, the best strategy is to start with the reader, not the design or production considerations. Start by identifying:. This will narrow down the format choices while also ensuring that your enhanced ebook is as widely available to your target readers as possible.
Find out more about this topic on our Digital Publishing useful resources site. Read more about PDF options. A continuously-updating book is something out of Parts of your own book become unpublished before your very eyes, with no change history. Readers ought to check my blog post about my own experience, with references to Ben Hammersley. I live to serve. Are you offering to do the editing? And, yes, you are correct in what you say.
Getting technical is for another forum, but getting technical is what we need to do next. What a great example of an enhanced ebook. An integrated experience would be perfect. A friend sent me this link this morning. Publishers just do not get it. If they price ebooks the same as hardbacks, they are going to lose a huge chunk of their customer base because people will not pay hardback price for a book they cannot even touch, even with enhanced features.
Publishers are letting greed get in the way and they are completely missing the point. Ebooks do not have covers or paper pages and do not cost as much to produce, so readers are not getting the same value for the cost. However, ebooks make it possible to sell books internationally without all the problems with customs and VATs and other costs, making their books available to a larger audience.
If major publishers keep this up, they will find themselves out of business and micro-publishers taking their profits.
I think that enhanced ebooks are kind of like the special features on DVDs, most of it is junk that nobody is ever going to bother with, but there is probably always something of interest in it.
And, I repeat, it has to be perfect. This is well beyond the capability of most writers, so I know a form of post-facto conversion will be necessary. You have to be technical. You have to learn certain skills. Once you make the shift from writer to author, then you make the shift from artist to professional. I do know some authors who feel they are delicate flowers, but they are few and far between. I am fully aware of the problems facing the production of ebooks. I personally believe a lot of bad business decisions are being made, and I do talk about them.
Cheap production is contributing to the value perception. HTML is only part of the problem. It is easy for us to say that authors and publishers must do this, must do that. When you look at the reality of how these groups work, you can see there are nuances that must be addressed. I also understand the need to balance all business priorities.
Getting into the technical nitty gritty makes no sense in the context of this post. Wrong place, wrong time. I was addressing the larger issue of enhanced ebooks.
There is a large amount of education that needs to be done when it comes to the production of ebooks.
It needs to happen on the author and publisher level. JM Cornnwell — spot on. The sooner the written word publishers learn the lessons that music publishers did a few years ago, the sooner the new digital book age will take off, rather that stutter and splutter around the early adopters.
Guess what the sweet spot was? I think that publishers should think of these different formats with a different mindset — and think of them as derivitives of the mothership. As it is, publishers, packagers, and authors are reducing the fees they are willing to pay editors.
Aptara, for example, asked me to do some very specialized medical editing. Yes, an hour. Now you want me to also add coding to the mix? What will you pay me? How awesome. The book is a way of reaching a different audience. Starting with the Crush It Vook — and I am going to reiterate that my initial skepticism about Vooks has been altered due to some really excellent stuff, the right books, the right approach, the right length…totally works — worked as an enhanced book because you thought out the end result.
The book, e and p, had specific content. The Vook took things in a different direction. I believe the people who bought both the book and the Vook feel they received something enhanced. You went into the project with a vision and you executed.
But you also got the basics right which you know is sometimes the hardest part. I like your mothership analogy.
In my realistic heart, I have to look at this differently. In my reply to debbie, I noted we could and will because we love to dissect our world! This digital file the basis for all versions of the book, electronic, print, excerpts, remixes, and more. Tools exist to make this work, but if publishing is ever going to move toward a truly digital workflow, the responsibility for making sure the base file is right lies with editorial.
I do not believe you want production people making determinations about paragraph, scene, or chapter breaks. Nor do you want production people coding for emphasis, blockquotes, and other elements. We cannot pretend this step does not exist nor can we expect authors to suddenly stop working in Word. A clean file makes the editorial job easier. Good tools make coding easy.
I used editorial team in my first paragraph because the actual roles will evolve. Then there will be copyediting, which may encompass Quality Assurance tasks, including checking to make sure the underlying code works. You get what you pay for, and my concern is two-fold. First, many talented editors are being priced out of the market.
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