Posts filed under 'e-books'
April 26th, 2010
To recap: my first experience noodling at the making of an eBook left me cold. So the arrival of Adobe’s Creative Studio 4 and its direct-to-EPUB capability was welcome—even though I did not upgrade to CS4. And with the coming of CS5, an upgrade I have already ordered, I hope the InDesign-to-EPUB path is even more seamless.
That sums up my software news.
As big a development as the foregoing is, there is another, even more significant step toward the inclusion of eBook production in my repertoire: adding an iPad to my computer line-up of desktop (24-inch iMac with second, 23-inch, Cinema Display), laptop (17-inch MacBook Pro), and handheld (second-generation iPod Touch) completes my toolbox for troubleshooting eBooks.
* * *
What I wrote above should have been the beginning of a whole different piece than this is turning out to be.
Instead, my wife mentioned to me that in noodling through some of the hits that came up when she googled me earlier today, she came across an exchange I had somewhere online sometime back. Apparently I felt compelled to say repeatedly that had no interest in eBooks, I would never make any, and would never get myself any kind of eReader.
Well, we see how that resolved itself.
January 27th, 2010
Today we take a break, an interlude, and a breather from the third and final piece of What I Have Learned About Columns while I bring you the text of an email I have sent Apple Computer.
Dear Apple, Inc.:
I started doing book production work on my first Macintosh, a IIx, 17 years ago. Six Macs later, thanks to those machines and the Internet, I am a marginally famous book designer–Google “Stephen Tiano” and see. Check out both my website and my blog.
What I’m interested in are any guidelines you may have for creating eBooks for the iPad. I realize there are such, indeed, a whole SDK for app developers, but I’m not talking about creating apps. I’ve noodled some with Adobe’s epub software. But I noticed its graphic capabilities were lacking. I assume that is no longer tue, if the iPad and it’s incredible graphic capabilities are to be used to th max. So, much the same way Apple established its Human Interface Guidelines for software developers, I assume there must be some set of rules for correctly creating eBooks for the iPad.
I understand you have your agreements with some “heavy hitter” traditional book publishers. But you may or may not have noticed–I sure have the last two or three years–print publishing is in, to be kind, a state of flux. To be more to the point, it has reached a state of chaos. In this two- or three-year period, I have begun to work with more and more self-publishing author. In fact, self-publishing books seems to be the notable area of print publishing that is growing and expanding in a big way.
As I said, I have played some with creating eBooks, but my initial efforts did not satisfy me as an artist-book designer. But the iPad has me returning for another, enthusiastic look-see. I am preparing to make a pitch to self-publishing clients that Kindle/Amazon and Google are yesterday’s eBook news. Henceforth my advice to self-publishing book authors interested in publishing eBook editions is that the iPad and Apple are the market-makers here.
Has Apple given any thought to the growing segment of self-publishing book authors? Do you have any information on standards for eBooks on the iPad that you are willing to share with a professional book designer?
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Stephen Tiano
Book Designer, Page Compositor & Layout Artist
tel. & fax: (631)284-3842 / cell: (631)764-2487
iChat screen name: stephentiano@mac.com
Skype: stephentianobookdesigner
email: steve@tianobookdesign.com
website: http://www.tianobookdesign.com
blog: http://tianobookdesign.com/blog
twitter: http://twitter.com/StephenTiano
I just received the following automated reply:
Message Subject: Other
Follow-Up: xxxxxxxx
That is all.
Continue Reading October 18th, 2009
Picture 2
October 13th, 2009
I began this piece three or four times, going back at least two weeks ago. What I realized is that instead of whining about the demise of the printed book—a premature plaint, I hope—I should come clean with myself that I need to get comfortable with the process of turning a print-ready file into an eBook.
So I plunged in the easiest way I knew. I googled the subject and found one of Adobe’s Technical Papers, “eBooks: From Adobe® InDesign® to the Kindle Store.” This paper lays out the process pretty seamlessly.
The paper’s methodology makes it sound pretty simple actually, laying out the procedure in four steps:
- Export the InDesign document to the EPUB format.
- Convert the EPUB file to alternative MOBI filetype.
- Preview the MOBI file on a Kindle if you wish.
- Lastly, if you want to sell you eBook on Amazon, upload it to the Kindle store at Amazon.com.
Touting, of course, Adobe’s latest and greatest, the paper advises that InDesign CS4 comes with “enhanced EPUB export features,” that preserves more of what the original InDesign document looked like. That’s the first bit of caution. Working this process by starting in InDesign CS3, as I did, you may lose the refined niceties of your document, your book. But the point of this experiment is to see about starting with an InDesign document and arriving at a file that Kindle reads.
Before I could follow the four steps above, I needed to download a piece of free software from Adobe, Digital Editions. Available on Adobe’s website—and, again: free—Digital Editions is used for the InDesign-to-EPUB translation. Next I had to get a piece of open-source—read: free—software, calibre, which is used to translate the EPUB file to the MOBI format. It is the MOBI format that Kindle reads.
And this is what the first two pages of what I got look like:
These are two fairly unadorned pages of straight text. Next up I’m going to try something with a single graphic or two. The trick with graphics, as far as I can tell, is to anchor them to the text in the InDesign document. See, when the InDesign file is translated, it goes as one long piece of text, scooting any and all graphics to the end—if I understand correctly. So anchoring graphics to the spot in the text where you want them to appear will allow them to flow with the text.
But I’ll need to see just how that works out.
September 30th, 2009
The first thing I got involved in this morning was reading a rather dimwitted statement of one man’s feeling that social media are pretty much useless. He had posted on a forum about publishing—himself a small publisher, I gather—sounding as if he rejected social media out of hand without trying his hand at reaching potential book-buyers that way. Perhaps the fact that it was very early morning, I had not taken my morning run, nor even completed morning ablutions, but I simply needed to dash of my own quick, perhaps nitwitted response.
… [I]s it just human nature to reach a point, an “old-time” comfort level, where anything new seems too odd or … well, too new to embrace? … I agree there are too many marketers of marketing, promising easy success and wealth, but I still suspect there’s a way to mine for paying customers for whatever you product [is]—books, freelance services (in my case).
I did not expect a reply. I was not surprised with one.
After posting my little diatribe I went for my run and—funny how the human mind works, or perhaps just how my mind works—I was immediately caught up in all the usual scenery on my route. I got to this one corner, turned and started down the stretch bounded on one side by a wooded area that comes right up to a home. Among the trees were the gang of eight or nine deer I see every morning if I get out early enough. I began the game of averting my eyes and staying as close to the curb as I could, in hopes of not intruding on the deer and causing them to bolt.
They let me come closer than ever before running off.
In an instant I found myself thinking how the deer, unlike the guy I railed against, had done something pretty new and bold: they had stood their ground and checked me out. Of course, they eventually found the good sense to not trust a human and ran off, but not before impressing me by doing this new thing.
Just as quickly, my mind shifted to—don’t laugh—the thought of how I tend to lament the apparent decline of print publishing. I am not enamored of e-books, Kindle, and other such new age readers. But I realized, during this connect-the-dots-interval from Luddite to deer to e-books, that it is high time I learned how to repurpose print books reading on electronic devices.
After my shower I checked an article I downloaded recently that gives a step-by-step for formatting books for Kindle. The first time I read the article, I followed its instructions for locating and downloading the two free utilities from that one needs for the process. The first is Adobe’s Digital Editions freeware; the second, Calibre, open source e-book conversion software. I had downloaded them both some time ago and they sit on one of my hard drives.
The new addition to my “projects” list is learning to translate a book created in InDesign into an e-book.
I wonder if there will ever be enough demand to make such processing a career choice.
