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Originally Posted by Psymon
Thanks for the links! Certainly factors to take into consideration (re market share of each platform). In that regard, here's an article written only just this month (October 7, 2013) which says that iBooks only has a 5% share of the market! Go figure...
http://thefutureofink.com/ebook-publishing-platforms/
I definitely need to think about this before making any drastic decisions.  If anything, I'm thinking that perhaps I might just get myself a Kindle, and then just design for iBooks and Kindle??? I'm just having a lot of trouble seeing myself designing for EVERY platform -- but getting the amazon market would certainly open up the biggest market (if I understand these stats correctly). |
If Apple has even 5% of the ebook market, I'll eat my slippers. What bollocks! We have the privilege of converting for some very big authors, and most of them don't sell 1 book on iBooks to every 1,000 they sell on Amazon. Our Authors consistently sell 95% or more on Amazon. FWIW.
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I don't really know anything about Kindle (yet!), but if Kindle Fire is basically the only one that can handle really nice, visually-appealing designs, can one design only for that (Fire) and have it not available for the other Kindles (in which one's design would probably fall apart)?
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You can design for the Fire, by using "fixed-format," but you don't want to do that for a variety of reasons. There are millions--millions--of devices out there yet that are "K7-compatible." That means, they don't display the fancier typography, etc. That's millions of potential buyers. You have to learn how to do "fallback," which means, have your fancier typography "fallback gracefully" for K7-device owners. (Kindle, Kindle2, DX and some Kindle3's).
If I may--without trying to get in your business--you may wish to not lose sight of the forest for the trees. A book's value is in its content--not how fancy the typography is. As a reader, not an ebook-converter or any other professional capacity, when I pick up a book in a bookstore that has a crapload of "fancy typography" (zillions of text boxes, exclamation marks, bullseyes, and the like) I tend to put it down, because my tendency is to think it's been
padded by clever layout people
to make it look like it has more content than it really does. Or, that the typography is to disguise a lack of content, or dreadful content.
So...I'm sure your book would stand alone even if done in Times New Roman, right? Didn't you have some message about doing it in "regular" font, and then putting the blackletter version at the back? Think of it that way for Amazon--your Fire version can have blackletter, even though I personally would not "go" for that--and your other versions will simply be in Caecilia, which is a TNR clone.
Just my $.02.
Hitch