Thread: Best format for etextbook
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Old 12-19-2011, 03:24 PM   #19
anamardoll
Chasing Butterflies
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Quote:
Originally Posted by screwdriver223 View Post
First of all, thank you everyone for your helpful and thoughtful replies. Your perspectives were much appreciated.

We've looked at the epub format and, unfortunately, it is not an option for our textbook. The text is typeset in inDesign, and contains complex layouts, and hundreds of figures and tables. The 'automatic' epub output from inDesign looks horrible. Given the length of the book (1400 pages) and our publication frequency (updated once a year), tweaking the epub output is just not a practical option. If you think there's a workable solution to this, I'm all ears.

That leaves us with distributing a pdf version of our text. As far as we can tell, Google is the only vendor which will sell a packaged pdf text 'as is', and not convert it to a proprietary flowing-text version. (In theory, a flowing-text version would be great, but it doesn't seem possible without hundreds of hours of manual work.)

Yes, the hardcopy of our text has been scanned and is available as a torrent. We tried to wrap it as a flash application on our website, but that too was circumvented and there are now high quality pdfs of our text torrented. We appreciate that no distribution method provides perfect DRM, but would like one that makes it easy for legitimate users to buy and use our product without making it trivially easy for people to share the book without buying it.

We really want to provide an ebook solution that our readers will enjoy. However, the solution needs to work within our somewhat flexible constraints. If any of you have reasons why we shouldn't sell through Google as a pdf text, or if you have any other suggestions, I would really like to hear.
I guarantee that if you took all the time you've wasted trying to prevent TEH TORRENTS and stuck it into that oh-so-time-consuming hand-tweaking, you'd be a lot better off. Someone who knows their way around Sigil could probably tweak your book with maybe 2-3 weeks of dedicated work. I'd bet safe money *I* could, anyway, and I'm not as much of an HTML guru as I'd like to be.
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