Request for feedback

[Wendy Wolfe]

I'm helping a textbook author with an ebook proof-of-concept.

We have a small working prototype, and would appreciate thoughts and feedback.

I've attached a MOBI file which describes the project and demos the prototype. It uses some KF8 formatting, so best viewed on a Fire.

I'm not an ebook expert and the author is aware of that (she'll hire a pro when things get rolling). This is our sandbox to explore how we can reformulate the content into an ebook.

Again, any thoughts, suggestions, ideas would be most appreciated.

Thanks in advance!
-wendy

[ATDrake]

I had a look in iBooks on my Mac, as well as Kindle Previewer set to e-ink and Fire modes (apparently Amazon removed the ability to preview as iDevice on the grounds that it wasn't quite accurate and now makes you convert and sideload).

One of the minor things that stood out is that the use of differing colours to highlight the different types of measurements in the Sample Worksheet Calculations didn't really show up very well on the simulated PaperWhite (it was all greyscale with noticeable slight but not really standout variations in lightness/darkness), or when using Night/Dark modes on iBooks (no colour highlights at all) or K4Mac/Fire (colour highlights, but the inversion of the regular text/background colours made made the highlighted bits too light to read easily and they faded into the highlight background).

So perhaps rather than highlights, a typographical variant for the text might work better? Perhaps italic underline for front measurements, bold underline for back, and bold italic underline for common, or something similar?

As for the 3-colour images mentioned in the intro, if they're line drawings/diagrams of some sort as I am assuming rather than photos, perhaps a difference in line-style (dotted, dashed) could be substituted for the outlines of the colour portions needed, and perhaps variations in greyscale (very light, very dark) or the use of high-contrast colours which would "convert" to distinct light/dark tones on an e-ink reader for any corresponding colour fills?

Hope this helps.

[Wendy Wolfe]

Thank you.

Re: line drawings. We have been considering using dots, dashes, and/or heavier lines in lieu of color. The challenge we are having is that the schematics become significantly less "readable". Small, important details tend to get lost. I suspect this will be a hot topic in team meetings.

Is it considered horribly bad form to go with three- or four-color? On Amzn, is it possible to warn in the book pre-purchase description that it requires a color screen? We aren't thrilled at the idea of requiring a color display, but it might be a compromise we have to make.

I'll play with the idea of using typography in lieu of highlights. My other option is a table, where the front/back/common values have separate columns.

Re: ecosystem barriers. In order to sideload to Kindle iOS devices, my understanding is that I have to downshift to an older MOBI format & lose significant formatting features. Am I incorrect on the details?

Again, thanks
-w

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Wendy Wolfe

Re: line drawings. We have been considering using dots, dashes, and/or heavier lines in lieu of color. The challenge we are having is that the schematics become significantly less "readable". Small, important details tend to get lost.

Another possibility that you might like to consider is using something like the "hatching" system that heraldry used before colour printing was common, much less cheap. Here's a Wikipedia article on it, and for an example of how it would look, alongside volunteer re-coloured equivalents without the hatching, Project Gutenberg's The Handbook to English Heraldry by Charles Boutell is pretty good at giving a taste (although some of the re-colourings are re-constructed from knowledge of what the colours would have been, where the original text shows them as plain drawings without the hatchings). And many of the old-school public domain heraldry books available for free via the Internet Archive use it as well, some of them representing very complex heraldic designs.

Potentially a hybrid approach, with hatchings or half-tone dots or whatever done in coloured lines which would show up well on a colour display but degrade gracefully to monochrome, could work, if it doesn't look too cluttery for the diagrams and thereby obscure them.

Originally Posted by Wendy Wolfe

Is it considered horribly bad form to go with three- or four-color? On Amzn, is it possible to warn in the book pre-purchase description that it requires a color screen? We aren't thrilled at the idea of requiring a color display, but it might be a compromise we have to make.

No, it's fine to go with colour if it seems like the best option. Quite frankly, MR skews towards e-ink reader owners, but likely most people outside are e-reading on some sort of phone/tablet/computer.

In the Amazon listings, it's certainly possible to auto-warn for large images/complex layouts, and even require a certain level of compatible device in order to even get the book at all. Here are some examples of free e-books which do just that, and perhaps you might like to try them out to see what kind of features they seem to be making use of: Scotland's Marine Atlas, The New Colombia, The 50 Ideas That Shaped Business Today, Highlighting Japan July 2014, Wine Regions of Victoria, South Australian Food User's Guide

Perhaps one might not be able to auto-warn specifically for colour, but there's always the option of placing a note very prominently at the top of the blurb description and the front of the e-book which people would be reading the sample of.

Originally Posted by Wendy Wolfe

I'll play with the idea of using typography in lieu of highlights. My other option is a table, where the front/back/common values have separate columns.

Actually, tables are starting to sound like a better idea to me, since it seems like the measurements used are things which would vary as one adapted the pattern to personal use. And so it might be nice to have them laid out kind of like a fill-in grid that people could copy to their own notes and substitute their own numbers for.

Originally Posted by Wendy Wolfe

Re: ecosystem barriers. In order to sideload to Kindle iOS devices, my understanding is that I have to downshift to an older MOBI format & lose significant formatting features. Am I incorrect on the details?

I really wouldn't know about this, but if you've got an iDevice handy, you can use Amazon's Kindle Previewer application to convert your experiments for sideloading and see if you lose any features you really wanted to make use of.

[Wendy Wolfe]

Another option is to investigate "media queries" to see if I can display different imgs for b/w devices. (http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/, http://epubsecrets.com/media-queries...le-devices.php and http://epubsecrets.com/media-queries-in-epubs.php, page 60 of the AMZN pub guidelines).

And I finally got the Previewer working again. The joy of upgrades: http://epubsecrets.com/fixing-kindle...x-yosemite.php

I'll check out the books you listed later today. Thanks again for the help and info.

(edit: it looks like a monochrome query is do-able. http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/#monochrome. Maybe two images, where the CSS rules display the appropriate img for display type. Must put on my Winnie-the-Pooh "Think Think Think" hat and ponder.)
-w