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 →
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 →
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 →
I’ve published a sample of the new book on the Adobe servers. It’s about 75 pages of the various sections of the book. If you are interested in a review copy I recommend the PDF is reader’s spreads with the full color graphics. Let me know if you are interested. Here’s a link to the page with more information and purchase links. If word processor book production is taking up too much time and the results are … Continue reading →
I don’t do this as often as I should (read other people’s books on self-publishing). It’s not because I don’t think they have good things to offer. Mainly it’s the result of a reasoning and a fact. First, I don’t want to accidentally plagiarize someone while writing. So, I tend to keep others’ writing out of the memory banks. Second, most non-fiction on book publishing is far too expensive for my little budget. But I picked up a copy … Continue reading →
I was talking to my author friend, Guy Stanton III, today and he shared this with me. Many of you already know this, but it’s worth a mention anyway. You know what’s really ironic, David, about combining all the books into one boxed set? I will make more money on the sale of the boxed set than if I had sold the entire series individually, but what’s even cooler is that the customer is going to pay … Continue reading →
For example, I got this official word today: “Yes, Kobo now accepts FXL EPUBs exported from InDesign and they can be put on sale, they have confirmed the same. The FXL EPUB output from ID also renders correctly on a Kobo device.” Now that is certainly good news which is to be added with the existing iBooks acceptance of ePUB3 books. But the real change has happened more subtly. All distributors now accept ebooks with embedded fonts I … Continue reading →
CC 2014 virtually redid ePUB export—adding fixed layout & radically improving reflowable ePUBs Indesign has always been the best software for publishing: print & ebook. I have already posted quite a bit about the new software. Most of the improvements seemed to be focused on we self-publishers. But my book is also redone— in places quite radically. A review by Mary Campagna Findley for the CS6 version “David Bergland has challenged me to think beyond the writing, editing, and cover design … Continue reading →