ebooks
03/25/10 07:57 Filed in: ebooks
WritersUa
hosted Joshua Tallent of ebookarchitects.com and
kindleformatting.com for two incredible sessions. I
hope to upload the slide sets when I get back to my
office. Joshua covered the formats, best features and
failures of the currect devices available in his
first session, and also some great distribution
sources that can get your ebook directly onto the
channels at amazon, barnes and noble, and other big
sellers. In his second session, he covers exactly how
to create an ebook. We looked at all the pieces and
parts of a kindle-ready book (mobi) and other readers
that take the epub format. What I learned was
astonishing. If you are working with a publisher who
is using InDesign to prepare their books for both
print and ebook, they have to change their layout
practices. The placement of pictures has to be done
in a very specific way, and it is not the way
publishers usually do it! And, small things like
bolding text have to be done as well in a very
specific way. So one question you should be asking
any publisher who is coming to you with an epub
project is to ask them if they have output epub
before, because if they haven't, there are some big
surprises in store for them. All of this is aside
from the index question.
I have already seen Joshua's great implementation of live indexes in ebooks, and I got to see XML Press's implementation as well. Extremely interesting. Joshua's is very clean and user friendly. XML Press has chosen a method that is too cluttered, using the titles of the sections instead of small indicators, and they aren't going to the paragraph level either.
The sessions were well attended, which means that it's not just traditional publishers who are trying to do the ebook process, it is also documentation teams. So the more we know about the entire process, the better we can discuss with a multiple set of clients the issues and the challenges.
As an aside, my presentation on revamping the AutoCAD index was surprisingly swamped! I was out of handouts within minutes, and I wound up talking for about two hours. Much interest! Here I thought the documentation world was really into search at this point, but no, they seem to have discovered that indexes are still needed, and the approach I was taking with the AutoCAD indexing was of much interest. Hurrah!
I have already seen Joshua's great implementation of live indexes in ebooks, and I got to see XML Press's implementation as well. Extremely interesting. Joshua's is very clean and user friendly. XML Press has chosen a method that is too cluttered, using the titles of the sections instead of small indicators, and they aren't going to the paragraph level either.
The sessions were well attended, which means that it's not just traditional publishers who are trying to do the ebook process, it is also documentation teams. So the more we know about the entire process, the better we can discuss with a multiple set of clients the issues and the challenges.
As an aside, my presentation on revamping the AutoCAD index was surprisingly swamped! I was out of handouts within minutes, and I wound up talking for about two hours. Much interest! Here I thought the documentation world was really into search at this point, but no, they seem to have discovered that indexes are still needed, and the approach I was taking with the AutoCAD indexing was of much interest. Hurrah!