Problem with Apple Books Default View

[Shane.Klink]

I am a freelance graphic designer and a long term client of mine decided he wanted to release a series of ebooks for his business so i have taken it upon myself to teach myself sigil, css, html, and so forth over the last couple weeks to put together his first book.

He loves ALMOST everything about it. The only real problem he has is how apple books (his prefered standard) views the image by default. So I went in and forced some things in the code such as using his font of choice and some control over things like spread to try to make him happy. The only thing left is his complaint that when the file is openned for the first time it appears in two-page-view with two columns (which is a problem due to some heirarchial coding examples he has in the book not being legible.

I know that the user end solution is to just boost the font size up one time in the app and we're good, but I've spent several days now trying everything I can think of to alter that value by default. for such a simple thing I have fallen all the way to considering pre-paginaiton, but that would require a full rebuild of the book and if we're not going to enjoy the customization of reflowable media we should just build the thing in pdf if we want control.

I've been altering meta data and odf pages for three nights straight and i'm losing my mind. please please please, does anyone have any idea how to just have it open up in single-page-view on first open? I looked into center-column and everything I can think of and he's started to get impatient.

Thank you,
Shane Klink

[leebase]

Have you checked if that's how he has his preferences for iBooks set? Perhaps it's not a book/file level issue.

[Shane.Klink]

I know that you can go into the settings and up the font to "larger" to get it to present one page at a time. But he wants it to open up as intended regaurdless of device/app settings.

I've been able to force other default settings to get it looking great (and it does after you get it to single-page-view, but I need to find a way to get it there out of the box. Most of the help i've found online are a few years old and am looking for someone with experience on the platform.

How do you get it to open in single page view (even on an ipad?) Someone has to know.

[KevinH]

From online search there does not appear to be a way to force ibooks to show one page in an ipad in landscape mode without moving to a fixed layout format like pdf.

Generally, overriding a users choice for fonts, sizes, colours, orientation, justification, etc is not a "good idea". Especially for general Accessibility concerns. I do not recommend it.

That said, if it is just the title page or first text page, have you thought about treating it like a book cover and using svg to fill the screen?

[Shane.Klink]

i have the overrides parsed out so that they only go active on compatible platforms. if i can't convince him I'm just going to have rebuild on 3 skus: epub, pdf, and mobi.

Which is an annoying extra bit of work, but what am I to do?

Thanks.

[KevinH]

BTW, there are many better pure ePub readers for iPads/iPhones. Some of my favourites are the Bluefire Reader (ADE) , or the Kobo Reader (ADE also). There is of course also the Kindle app for ipads. As a result, I rarely use iBooks for anything on my iPad. So targeting Apple Devices in no way means having or using iBooks.

[tomsem]

You might start a thread on the ePub forum here as well.