The Economist's Babbage blog on making an e-book

[sufue]

The Economist's Babbage (science and technology blog) finds that making a quality ebook is much harder than producing a paper book:

But even he was unprepared for how easy it has become to print a book and how difficult it remains to produce an electronic version suitable for a range of e-readers, including the Kindle.

Link is here: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babba...ook-production

[slm]

As one of Babbage's commentators noted, the result stems directly from the choice to compose in InDesign. That makes print books easy but epubs hard. Start in a reflow platform and epub becomes easy and print harder.

[rollei]

Interesting article. Learning something about ebook production.

[Marcy]

And that is where the trouble began. Accustomed to creating InDesign layouts for which the ultimate destination is either print or PDF, Babbage and his designers (under his direction; the e-buck stops with him) made myriad tiny choices that refined the presentation, but which made EPUB conversion tedious. Choices as simple as the width of a text container for a headline, repeated 28 times throughout the book, once per story, affected the flow of text that InDesign created.

This seems to be their major problem. They were trying to control every aspect of the presentation and you just can't do that with an epub. One of my favorite things about ereading is that *I* control the look and can set the font, font size, line spacing, paragraph spacing, etc. based on my preferences.

When e-publishing you need to accept that the reader can change these things instead of obsessing over ever detail of how the book will look.

Originally Posted by Marcy

This seems to be their major problem. They were trying to control every aspect of the presentation and you just can't do that with an epub. One of my favorite things about ereading is that *I* control the look and can set the font, font size, line spacing, paragraph spacing, etc. based on my preferences.

When e-publishing you need to accept that the reader can change these things instead of obsessing over ever detail of how the book will look.

Exactly. That and the fact that those guys, like most ePub major publishers, don't have a frigging clue as to how to create an ePub. It isn't rocket science. Relying on a bloated Adobe product to design and produce a lean ePub is stupid because Adobe products were designed to produce bloated crap like PDFs. They first need to spend a year learning HTML and what H1, H2, H3, P, etc. are used for. (Most of us learned this in minutes, but those guys are extra stupid so give them a year.) Then they need to be whipped to within an inch of their lives every time they use CSS to hardcode unwanted formatting.

[Purple Lady]

Converting PDF to epub doesn't work well. Why on earth did they try to do it that way?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

Converting PDF to epub doesn't work well. Why on earth did they try to do it that way?

Because they're old school, at least six years behind the times, and don't know the difference between electronic paper and electronic books.
Just the fact that their technology columnist is looking into ebooks now is ample proof.
Or, we could sum it up in the handy-dandy: clueless.

Note:

Your correspondent also has printer's ink in his veins: he trained as one of the last dedicated typesetters, worked in a printing plant in his 20s, and designed and produced dozens of books in the 1980s and 1990s.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Because they're old school, at least six years behind the times, and don't know the difference between electronic paper and electronic books.
Just the fact that their technology columnist is looking into ebooks now is ample proof.
Or, we could sum it up in the handy-dandy: clueless.

Note:

Yep, clueless.

[Jessica Lares]

The stupid thing about it, is that not even Adobe is stupid enough to do this. They actually know how to make proper PDF textbooks, and then e-ink friendly stuff for the people who are reading using those devices.

[Zetmolm]

Six years? They're at least ten years behind the times!
They should have looked here, for instance.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Zetmolm

Six years? They're at least ten years behind the times!

Well, he wanted an epub and the magical universal format didn't exist until 2008, which is when all the discussions on how to get epubs out of InDesign took place.

[ballfresno]

Originally Posted by Marcy

They were trying to control every aspect of the presentation and you just can't do that with an epub.

This is quite interesting to me. I spend so much time trying to get my students to stop doing exactly this when writing technical articles. I have them use LaTeX which allows them to concentrate on the content and not the formatting. Journals will provide the style files which will format their articles for them to the journal standards.

But boy is it difficult to get the students to stop trying to control everything!

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by ballfresno

This is quite interesting to me. I spend so much time trying to get my students to stop doing exactly this when writing technical articles. I have them use LaTeX which allows them to concentrate on the content and not the formatting. Journals will provide the style files which will format their articles for them to the journal standards.

But boy is it difficult to get the students to stop trying to control everything!

And those are young folks...
...now imagine trying to do it with somebody with ink in their blood!
(You'd think they'd have been poisoned by it ages ago, but still...)

[Zetmolm]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

And those are young folks...
...now imagine trying to do it with somebody with ink in their blood!
(You'd think they'd have been poisoned by it ages ago, but still...)

But those young folks grew up with MS Word. And if there is one tool that allows you to mix form and content...

Those people with ink in their blood may be better off. In those 'good old days', content was created on your Remington, and the typesetter took care of the formatting.

[Alfy]

Thanks to the Economist for publishing an article that will support the editor's claims that, of course, ebooks should cost the same, if not more, than pbooks. It's especially annoying as this is a completely one-sided debate; I have still to read a widely published article aiming at general readers that explains how easy it is to create epubs . It almost feels like a conspiracy, like if the Economist was owned by the Economist Group, which is owned 50% by Pearson PLC, that also happen to own 47% of Penguin Random House. Oh, wait...