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Originally Posted by Sonist
If set up correctly, InDesign should be able to create perfectly fine EPUB files in the vast, vast majority of cases, and the rest will probably take an extra day or two of work.
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"Perfectly fine" isn't the description I've heard from people trying to create ePub files with them. Recent point releases have supposedly improved ePub support, but I haven't used CS5 and can't say from experience. (I have a much older version of InDesign here with no ePub support.) Adobe has been a main force pushing ePub as the ebook standard format, which made InDesign's relative lack of support for producing ePub ironic.
And from what I've heard, ePub isn't one size fits all: you are at the mercy of the ePub viewer in the device, so you may need to do tweaking for best results. You can't just create an ePub file and assume it will look the same in all reader devices that display ePub.
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I personally would be happy happy with PDFs (which can be reflowable as well), if there were larger screen ereaders available, but that's another topic.
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PDFs created with proper tagging are reflowable if the reader implementation of the PDF viewer supports it. Amazon's Kindle DX viewer does not. No surprise: it's intended for things like textbooks in PDF format, and how do you reflow a multi-column layout? (Forget having two separate layouts, multi-column for print and single column for ebook. Textbooks are expensive as is. Maintaining two output files would make them more so.)
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I am not sure why you are so defensive of publishers....
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I have some idea of how they operate. I'm not defending publishers per se. I
am suggesting that you won't see ebooks from major trade publishers at the kind of prices a lot of folks here might like, because they
can't sell them that cheap and make money.
And responses of "Let them go under if they can't adapt" is a "Be careful what you wish for. You might get it." matter.
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Ebooks are relatively easy to produce, if you already have the InDesign files.
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Depends on the ebook. And for back catalog, you may not have the InDesign files. InDesign as the standard tool is relatively recent. Everybody used to use Quark Express. (There's a fair amount of back catalog out there for which
no electronic files exist, because it dates from the days when you submitted a hardcopy manuscript.)
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And they should be cheaper than their paper counterparts, for the obvious reasons.
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How
much cheaper? The usual "obvious reasons" - dropping the cost of print/bind/warehouse/distribute - aren't sufficient for what folks might like to see.
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There is no need to try to make the process sound more complicated than it really is, to justify the higher profits publishers want to extract from the new technology.
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Right now, creating ebooks is not part of the standard workflow. It would be nice if it were "Save As PDF for printer, Save As ePub for ebook". ePub has the necessary metadata, and other formats can be created from it via scripted conversion. But the last I heard, InDesign ePub support wasn't good enough to make it that simple. Right now, ebooks are an extra step in the process.
Ideally, publishers should store things as XML and use XSLT to handle much of the conversion to other formats. While tools exist to do XML markup, they aren't widely used in publishing. To some extent it's inherent conservatism, but that strikes me as misplaced. If I'm the person doing typesetting and markup, my concern will be a UI that will let me use the program easily to do the work. The fact that the output is an XML file instead of a PDF is irrelevant.
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Dennis