Araldo is a headline font with spunk for today. I needed something with a little life for my new book production group: Biblia Serif, Dreatha, and now Araldo. This new font family is doing well for me. Biblia Serif and Draetha are both excellent book production font families. In other words, they are not memorable. In fact, if they do their job well, you don’t even notice them. But as I mention in the flyer to the … Continue reading →
This is just a quick note about some free font design resources which provide good typographic knowledge. I’m mentioning this because a large portion of my readers don’t come out of a professional graphic design or typographic background. These things are often not known by authors whose background is mostly found in Office and free design apps. The longer you work in page layout, the more important fonts and font design become for many if not most … Continue reading →
Again, Kindle image size rules change. Not a whole lot, but the new outrageous Kindle image sizes become more understandable. I was reading a Kindle formatting guide, from Amazon, the other day which said full-width images needed to be 3000 pixels wide. This is not that bad. However, in Aaron Shepard’s Publishing Blog today, I read the following paragraphs: But not long ago, I received one of those dread quality notices from Amazon, in this case warning me of … Continue reading →
I thought a good way to start the new year would be a 2018 ebook conversion guide. Things changed quite a bit in 2017. Plus, CC 2018 added some handy new features. Remember, I have a seemingly unusual attitude. I believe that spending a lot of time hand-coding a book is a waste of time. The good news is that InDesign CC now works well enough to make writing code unnecessary. 2018 ebook conversion guide As you know, … Continue reading →
Book designers often dread converting books to ebooks — the process of changing a greyscale printed book to various full-color ebooks: downloadable PDFs, ePUB FXL and Reflow, & Kindle books of various flavors from e-ink to large Fire tablet. It often seems a bit like wizard work requiring incantations, lots of smoke, and mirrors. Sad to say, on the Kindle end of things, that’s fairly accurate. Yet things are not as they seem, as InDesign CC has … Continue reading →
Printing consolidation necessary: Xerox buying R.R. Donnelley This is all part of the consolidation necessary to make these hugely expensive presses run. Hardware prices make printing consolidation necessary. The article in Publishing Executive only covers magazines. But it goes much further than that. In my world, everything is on-demand. This includes the on-demand presses, and the four ereaders: Kindle, iPad/Phone, Nook, & Kobo. We’ll see this change here also. Someone will take on Ingram, just like someone will take … Continue reading →
I received this in an email from Aaron Shepard this morning. I didn’t get permission to copy this, but I’ve done what I can to make sure you know this is Aaron’s writing. Evidently, Kindle book modification is still a problem after they are uploaded in the name of “better typography”. Aaron has some serious questions about this process. It is certainly something of which to be aware. The following quote is from Aaron’s email: One of the problems in … Continue reading →
Gizmag has an interesting article today about color e-Ink. They claim it will not have any impact on ereaders. I hope they are wrong. Paperwhites, and their ilk, are one of the largest drags of ebook publishing today. They are great for simple novels and white papers. They are quite bad for non-fiction with its need for complex lists, large tables, color images, and so on. Color e-ink could bring the most popular ereaders to a new … 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 →
Even after over forty-five years, there’s still that little thrill when you see a finished book for the first time. It’s too bad that Amazon won’t carry them. But, they are the best choice for the classroom or self-study. The spiral-bound workbook I had to cut out the Christian marketing section to get the page count below the 470 page maximum for spiral-bound. The only thing I really miss are the color graphics. To get that (and … Continue reading →