Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
Does everybody out there design just one single version of their books that works on virtually every platform? That seems like a shame, actually.
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Well, there are multiple cases, involving a lot more manpower, and those that involve a lot less.
Case #1: Some people create completely separate versions per store (Usually the "big 3": One for Amazon, one for Apple, one for B&N/everything else). Some even go much further than this, and start designing for specific devices.
Case #2: Some people on MobileRead will just have the same code, but swap out different CSS files depending on if this is an EPUB, or if this is an EPUB that is being fed through KindleGen (for sale on Amazon). So you can have a:
- KindleCSS.css
- EPUBCSS.css
Case #3: Some people just design EPUBs that work everywhere (but of course, you cannot go too far in any direction with "fancier" CSS/code/SVG)).
The reason is economics, and you get the most "bang for your buck" if you create one version to rule them all! I personally would rather spend time getting more higher quality conversions of books out there (that looks pretty damn good on nearly all devices), than spending so much time per book by creating dedicated versions, to MAYBE get it looking "WOW THIS IS THE GREATEST EPUB I HAVE EVER SEEN ON MY IPAD" (and then Apple comes out with a new ipad/ibooks and some quirk your EPUB was dependent on makes it not look so great any more
).
Plus, you need a lot of different devices to test on... and most of us mere humans just have one, two, maybe four devices to test on. Not everything under the sun (and each of these devices all have their own little weird quirks, where things break where you don't expect them to).
Anyway, the books that I handle (non-fiction economics books), case #3 works perfectly fine for me. All I need is images, tables, footnotes, headers, justification, and bold/italics.
You start going too far in one direction or the other with your design decisions, and chances are more likely you will start breaking in the fringe cases (think reading on a tiny cellphone, or reading with a very large font, ...)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
While I would certainly agree that it would be ridiculous to come up with countless different versions geared to work on each and every platform, I don't think it would be unreasonable to do two versions -- a "fancy" version for those platforms that can handle the fancier stuff, and a "plain" version for those that don't.
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You should always keep in mind "degrading gracefully" (for example, in the books where you embed a font that has fancy ligatures, IF the device cannot understand this, it should degrade to their individual characters, and not weird symbols).
And some people DO do this, putting in KF8 specific code, and MOBI specific code, etc. etc. BUT, you have to keep in mind, that MOBI is pathetic, and almost all of the fancy stuff you want to do is just NOT supported by it at all.
Also, much of the ebook mentality is about USER PREFERENCES, NOT publisher preferences. So the user typically gets to decide how THEY are most comfortable reading (what fonts, margins, line-spacing, etc. etc.). This tends to break a lot of "design decisions" that you try to foist on them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
Well, what the hey, how does one design for Kindle at all, then, if one wants to incorporate any kind of design? What's the point in coming up with a design that'll work in KF8 if anyone with an earlier model won't be able to render it properly?
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Meh... it is just that old Kindles are still a HUGE chunk of the marketshare, but the format was still really designed for fiction novels, basic non-fiction, mostly text works, etc. etc. At the time, it was NOT designed for super complex, perfect typography "olde" works. :P
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
Or does amazon have things set up somehow that if your design incorporates things that will only work in KF8 (or whatever), then you need that in order to even buy the book in the first place?
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Sadly nope, there is no way that you can say "KF8 only". You CAN, just ignore MOBI completely (and write code that does not "degrade gracefully"), but I believe you might get a lot of customer complaints, and Amazon might take your book down for being formatted poorly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
I have no idea how Amazon/Kindle works -- I have no idea what format the files are in, like, if they're in HTML/CSS like epubs are, or what. I guess I should start googling it and learning about it in my spare time, of course, but in that regard if anyone can point me directly to a really good tutorial on the subject (and hopefully one that's not too confusing) that would be much appreciated.
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Well, just imagine KF8 as exactly like EPUB (it pretty much is). And MOBI as the hideous plaintext cousin, that can barely do anything.