[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by dharh

Wow. I'm super surprised this isn't the case already. As a programmer/designer myself with something so obvious as this kind of feature it would have been done a year ago at the latest.

It's especially mystifying because Adobe is the major force behind the ePub standard, which evolved from the Open eBook specs. You would think, if they were pushing hard to get a format adopted as a standard, that they'd be working to make tools to create documents using that standard.

It's probably a side-effect of their focus on PDF as an electronic document format, and the fact that everybody who uses InDesign expects PDFs as the output, because that's what the printer wants to see. So InDesign will do PDF output perfectly, because that's what the customers are buying, but ePub will be back burner because most of their customers don't (yet) care about it. This is an obstacle to change. I had dinner Thursday night with an old friend who is a designer, and does both print and online stuff. He talked about a publisher he works with with print and online divisions. The online folks are well aware of the technology involved and the possibilities it provides. The folks on the print side are another matter entirely.

At the Barnes and Noble eBook launch, an Adobe rep told me point releases of InDesign had fixes intended for better ePub support, but I don't know what the current state of development is. (I have an ancient 2.0 release of InDesign, but can't justify upgrading to a current release.)

Meanwhile, two big roadblocks to ebooks are lack of a standard format everyone supports, and lack of tools to create the electronic texts.

The first is slowly occurring, and it looks like ePub will be the winner. You may not like it, but it's the most widely used (by everyone save Amazon...) And as mentioned, it's a base from which you can convert to other formats if desired. Standards efforts are always time-consuming, fraught, and political, with lots of folks with axes to grind saying "We firmly support standards. Do it our way!", so the slow nature of the process is not a surprise.

The second is the bigger problem. As mentioned, everyone submits Word documents as manuscripts, and all major publishers use InDesign to create the finished books. What we want is for the creation of ebooks to be essentially automatic, as part of the standard workflow for the publisher, without requiring extra steps, tools, and expertise. That requirement means we are really asking for improvements to InDesign, as few producers will want to switch to a different product or add yet another tool to their existing process. If InDesign matures to the point where the print/ebook workflow is "Save As PDF/Save As ePub", we'll be a very long way down that road.

There will still be gotchas. There are some things (like textbooks) where the content pretty much requires PDF, as you need to see the page as it would look if it was printed, and Save As ePub will produce less than optimal results no matter how good InDesign is at producing it. But those will be a minority of the total books published.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for the Promised Land, but progress is occurring.
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Dennis