New Styles for ePUBs in InDesign —this is one of the wonderful things I discovered while I was researching and testing for the revised procedures for making excellent ePUBs in my new book, Niche Publishing for Believers Using InDesign. I was just going edit/proof my old Book Publishing book. It’s twelve years old or a little more. But as I got into it, I ended up with a massive revision. I have learned so much in the … Continue reading →
Mumble, grumble, PITA, ;oebpa;b/ hkvo… Ok! Now that’s off my chest. I just had fits with a Kindle book for a client. I use to do them first (after the print/PDF versions were complete) because they were such a pain in the a…, but I’ve begun doing them last because they’re just bleah. Working with Kindle formatting seems like stepping back a decade. For me, the ePUB problems have largely been solved: paragraph shading, anchored graphics, embedded … Continue reading →
I read another interesting intro to an article to which I’m not subscribed about the possible excellent future for B&N. Smelly ears, by the way, is an old term for an entity with its head so far up its you know what that the ears stink. B&N is finally going to separate its college stores from the Nook and brick & mortar operation. Again it mentions the disastrous Nook. There’s a very simple solution. Provide the brick & … Continue reading →
As I mentioned a while ago, I made textbook versions of my two best sellers: Practical Font Design and Writing in InDesign. The process was very simple and easy. I just uploaded the PDF I had developed for download. It had a bit of color added, but it is basically the print version slightly optimized for viewing on-screen. The conversion was very fast and seemingly flawless. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, it’s just a wrapped PDF so far, with … Continue reading →
OK! I’m a little punch-drunk I’ve been through this before. In fact, I’ve been through it five times now. it’s been pretty much non-stop since 1991. My life and career [yours too, probably unless you’re a kid born after 1980—especially after 1990] has been radically transformed on a continual basis since 1990 with five major paradigm shifts. Hand-drawn art and metal type to photo-production [Offset Lithography]—the 1960s & seventies: I started in the midst of this change. My … Continue reading →
This posting is a slight expansion of a comment made by Michael Perry of Inkling Books on my “Designing ePUBs With InDesign” New Release posting this morning Michael has been a long-time friend of The Skilled Workman, and his comments have made this a much better blog. He is much closer to a traditional publisher than I. His opinions are worth analyzing and I agree entirely. As you can see in his comment, Amazon is not interested in … Continue reading →
There are always going to be complaints. But I can do everything I want to do with anchored graphics right now. With one major exception: It’s hard to predict what will happen with a graphic crossing a page break. If it’s floating, it may just not render. I can understand that. I really don’t have any idea how to handle that. But I can simply change my graphic so it doesn’t float and the page break will … Continue reading →
The new InDesign CC9.2, released this week, gives us much to be happy about as book publishers Most of the changes affect book production. The long-promised TypeKit integration is now available with over 700 Adobe TypeKit fonts freely usable and licensed for print, Web, and ebook as part of Creative Cloud. It runs much faster. There has been a major reworking of the hyperlinks panel to simplify its use. There’s a full featured QR code generator. There is … Continue reading →
This one almost slipped past me. Bob Levine wrote about it at InDesign secrets. Adobe’s now giving away licenses to the .folio format. This could be huge! Magazines were dying because .folio was so expensive Now maybe we’ll see some more folio readers. Maybe tablet reader apps will be able to handle folio also. Maybe PDF will finally go the way of the dodo. The ability to offer books with multiple columns and portrait/landscape versions gives technical … Continue reading →
I received this email a couple days ago. It is typical of the type of questions I get from every author for whom I either publish their book or produce the digital artwork for their book so they can publish it. The only proviso is that I only publish books for authors I know, for books that I like. I’m a fairly radical Christian, so I expect any books I publish will promote the Gospel, be a … Continue reading →