Exciting ebooks with Anne Luo

Life has been interesting and sometimes challenging in the studio recently as we push forward with the ever-changing ebook/digital format options for producing books.

More and more the printed page is no longer the final word, we are now being asked to produce books that have an additional life as an eBook, interactive PDF, fixed layout or flowable ePub, to name a few!

Thanks to some real advances with the latest versions of Creative Suite, and streamlining of how we set up our InDesign files we are now (if you listen to Adobe’s marketing) only one click away from producing an ePub file and a beautiful ebook…yeah. This is where we have conquered the most challenges. Our 'Book Design' aim has been to keep the same level of design that goes into a print book coming through to the ebook, e.g. chapter headings, type design, page breaks, text spacing, wrapping, tables etc (we don't want our ebooks looking like digitised manuscripts) and then get the file through the validation process. There are speed bumps here that need fixing. 

Other valuable assets that an ebook has or can have are navigational and local table of contents, searchable content, use of live hyperlinks, inclusion of sound and video, etc. These also all need to work and validate to enhance the readers’ experience. Which is totally what our aim is.

I learnt the secrets of cracking open the epub and editing the codes in toc.ncx and content.opf files (two of most important files in an epub that control just about EVERYTHING). They looked like headaches at the start but got easier and more familiar the more I did. By the time I’d edited, zipped and unzipped, previewed and ran validation tests many, many (and many more) times the validation result was 'Congratulations! No problems were found'. HOORAY!!!

That was the biggest challenge completed, getting the validation problem-free. From here I could move to uploading an ebook to an online reseller. For this we developed an interactive Metadata form with all the questions needed to make the uploading process smooth and easy. 

There are a variety of ebook formats out there and each suits a different type of book. Fixed-layout ebooks are a relatively new kind of ePub. Someone said it is like a hybrid of a PDF with complete control of the pages and a flowable ePub which is an open-source format of digital books. Unlike normal flowable ePubs in which the content flows on in page dimensions and fonts determined by end user devices, we have complete control over the design and page layout in fixed-layout ebooks. The text is alive and searchable in fixed-layout just as in a flowable ePub. We can achieve text sitting on top of images without rasterizing the whole page to a flattened image, like you’d have to do for flowable ePubs. This format is great for children's pictures books, and any books with content-specific layout where text and images need to stay at certain positions.

To achieve these advantages it requires a lot more work cracking the codes in HTML base programs like Dreamweaver, but in many cases it's definitely worth the effort, and the possibilities for this format are very exciting.

We also had a recent project requiring a new level of communication with client returnable interactive PDF forms. These are more advanced than the interactive PDFs we have made in the past, with form fields, clickable internal links and external hyperlinks. Adobe Reader 8 and later users can fill in and save PDF files locally, and send these back to the author electronically. This makes data communication much faster, easier and fun too. You just type an answer directly on the file page and hit the send button. 

This great ability with PDF forms can bring many other projects to the next level. For example, educational books now can have fillable write-on-line and comments fields in an electronic PDF version. Teachers and students who use free Adobe Reader can fill out their answers and comments and send to each other by email. Simple.

So we keep learning, keep learning and keep learning. The more we do, the easier it gets.

Perhaps one day it will be just one click of a button to produce any of the above. But not yet, and that is where we are here to help.