Designing ebooks

I've had the travel bug recently, Auckland, Melbourne, Wellington all within the last four weeks. It was great putting names to faces and catching up with people. Some of the most interesting meetings I had were with multimedia and ebook developers.

I learnt that we're progressing nicely down the right tracks. The multimedia products we are currently producing have given us a nice insight into understanding code and designing navigation. Our thoughts on working smarter with our printed products are right on track with creating clean and consistent style sheets for the printed books we're producing today, which will more than likely be converted into tomorrow's ebooks.

The goal is to create pdf files that can easily be converted into XML as cleanly as possible so publishers are not paying extra costs to have a developer clean up code. Even if it's a digital product it still needs design. Infact I learnt that design is even more important than ever!

Question is though, 'how do we as designers charge for this'. A publisher will still be getting a pdf file in which they can mass produce their product and sell to either the print or the digital market. Do publishers want us to supply a completed ebook product e.g. explore having a developer on our team?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this ...