No one denies that printed books are irreplaceable. They can be lent, traded, displayed and enjoyed for decades. But electronic books have their place as well. They're portable, adaptable, infinitely customizable and —whether you like it or not— they're going to live side-by-side with printed books for years to come.
EPUB is a publishing standard designed for reflowable content which means the book can be viewed on devices of multiple dimensions. It does this by using XHTML/CSS for rendering the book and a set of standards on top of that to store metadata that can be extracted by E-Book readers to render a table of contents and other details.
The physical book is something designers get.
It’s got a lot going for it, not the least of which is the fact that it’s physical. The boundaries are there, right before us. No guess work is necessary. And so there are a lot of great examples of well designed books.
You needn’t look far to uncover a mountain of beautifully typeset and balanced pages. But what about digital books? Tablets are in many ways just like physical books—the screen has well defined boundaries and the optimal number of words per line doesn’t suddenly change on the screen. But in other ways, tablets are nothing like physical books—the text can extend in every direction, the type can change size.
So how do we reconcile these similarities and differences? Where is the baseline for designers looking to produce beautiful, readable text on a tablet?
Just as web design has evolved and matured, so too will ebooks, and book designers and writers have a new medium available in which to express their creativity.
Professional book and ebook design makes a difference.
People take notice, you become a credible author and your work becomes worth reading. If it's non-fiction you are likely to be categorised as an expert in your field.
Need to distribute documentation, create an eBook, or just archive your favorite blog posts? EPUB is an open specification for digital books based on familiar technologies like XML, CSS, and XHTML, and EPUB files can be read on portable e-ink devices, mobile phones, and desktop computers.
Do you ever wonder (or are you currently struggling with) how you can convert your trade books, journals, whitepapers, instruction manuals and such from a “designed for print/PDF” InDesign format to a digital eBook for the iPad bookstore, the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, and other devices?
