No! You can’t do it in BBEdit or Word It all comes back to the print/ebook divide. That divide is only apparent to the book designers. For the readers, a book is a book. Ebooks are cheaper (or should be). Normal printed books are high resolution, typographic marvels. But to the reader, a book is a book. For authors, publishing only a print version or only an ebook version is worse than silly—it’s foolish. If you want … Continue reading →
I posted last week about the dangers of allowing your ebook to degenerate into a Website. After all, “An ebook is just encapsulated HTML & CSS.” It was basically a plea to design your ebooks in InDesign. I missed making my core point. I wasn’t saying that code geeks cannot design ebooks. I was saying that most coders are not designers, but technicians. One of my commenters (Tom) suggested that writers are just as bad as coding … Continue reading →
I had a little go’round with a coding geek on the #eprdctn Twitter feed about the use of fonts in ebooks. He was muttering about those #$*&^!%^#$ designers, and I ended up biting off the tips of my fingers to avoid cutting him a new one to drain all his pent up hostility. It was hardly a fruitful conversation. But it got me thinking. The real problem with the new publishing is the layout quality The quality … Continue reading →
Producing a KF8 Kindle book Until very recently, I gave some very explicit instructions for the construction of the HTML and CSS needed to step back in time to Amazon’s MOBI format. It was extremely limited in what was allowed. Designers are rarely good coders, and writers even less so. InDesign is the best tool we have at present, but there’s still a long way to go until some of the typographic niceties we rely on in print … Continue reading →
Sometimes I feel so stupid. The solution to the incomplete CSS in exported ePUBs is so much more simple than I thought. Your mind just seems to turn a little corner and the solution pops up in front of you. My beef with InDesign CS5.5’s ePUBs was the need to edit the CSS I’ve posted several times here and published a couple books about fixing the ePUB CSS. What I wrote was accurate. It’s not difficult, as … Continue reading →
ePUB CSS Repair Once you have your ePUB It will usually open in ADE (depending on what you have installed on your computer). Proof it carefully. Redo as necessary. If your computer is like mine, the graphics will be very poor in ADE. Basically ADE is very crude. Then drop a copy of the ePUB file onto iTunes and sync it into iBooks on your iPad to read it in iBooks. The reason you need to use … Continue reading →
There is nothing long and extended here, because I remain convinced that most book designers consider coding anathema. But after finding the script I mentioned earlier today, I have found several interesting things that can be easily fixed in the ePUB. Edit the CSS if you can (or don’t if you can’t) The problem with this has been the difficulty with decompressing the .epub file and then recompressing back into .epub. For that you will need a … Continue reading →
One of my largest frustrations with desgining ePUBs has been the difficulty of decompressing and recompressing them to edit the CSS. Today on one of the groups I work with I was sent this: Because of the problem with the mimetype-compression, rearchiving is on the Mac only via Terminal or via script possible. One Script is called ePUB Zip 1.0.2. This script works very well. Just Google it, and download it. It would be a … Continue reading →