Hands-on with .epub

Michael Jensen | 02/24/2010

I recently constructed an .epub eBook using free tools, to see how it would work—how easy it might be, how attractive I might make it, how the more-complicated typographic elements of the Web (right-align callouts, tables, divs) might be represented in the .epub ebook format.

InDesign, and a few other professional typesetting/formatting systems can produce simple ebooks fairly easily, but I wanted to understand a bit more deeply what it entailed, hands-on.

The first time doing anything is the hardest, of course, and while I’d overseen the production of ebooks, I’d not gotten in with nuts, code, and bits for years. I tried out a number of awkward free systems, and built my own files from scratch.

So far, the best tool right now for experimenting with ebooks is probably Calibre—an opensource and free ebook management (but not editing) system.

Calibre reads many file formats, and can also export many formats—which means you can take a well-formed HTML file, read it into the system, add metadata to it, view it within the (forgiving) Calibre reading software, and then save as an .epub format file, one functionally ready for pulling into an ebook reader.

I say “functionally” because ebook-reading software (not the format itself) is at a similar stage of development to what browsers were back in 2000—when Netscape displayed the same Web page differently from Internet Explorer, or other internet browsers.

Today, the same file that renders well in Calibre or Adobe Editions may not render well in a Sony Reader, or on an iPod with Stanza. Text-wraps around pictures, for example, don’t translate, nor do most typographic niceties. I tried a variety of experiments to test the boundaries.

With the .epub I was producing, I ended up having to rethink how to represent the pictures-and-captions that littered the text, even to the extent of moving their placement, in order to achieve a sort of lowest-common-denominator, very-simple linear presentation—a poor cousin to the print experience.

That will evolve, of course—ebook reader software will improve, and become more consistent across devices—but for now, as you experiment with digital export, choose a few straightforward texts, get someone on staff to experiment with Calibre, and then try reading it into whatever ebook reader and software that you have available.

Lowest common denominator simplifying may not be optimal, but at least you won’t have grumpy customers.

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On iPads and Tablets

Michael Jensen | 02/23/2010

The US is all a-buzz about Apple’s iPads, and about What It All Means.

What it all means is both small and huge.

On the one hand, tablets may become the perfect reading device—with processor smarts, page-turning grace, color, multimedia capabilities, likely (eventual) 3-D display capabilities, and an Amazon-Killer App with a business model, the iBookstore or other ebook stores, thrown in.

Yet that’s the small meaning.

The larger meaning has to do with a transformation of technology into consumer commodity. Steve Jobs didn’t talk about the gigahertz, about pixels, about storage. He didn’t announce a new operating system, or the implementation of Apple’s new chip, or the SDK or the API.

Instead, it was about coolness, and sexiness, and a lush reading experience.

Of course it also means that Apple is trying to define the landscape of the next few years, and that they’re asserting that their vision of computing is the right one. Whether it works or not will be seen around Christmas, 2010… but regardless, what Apple has done is frame the discussion, and massively raised the profile, of digital publishing, simply by bringing out a cool, sexy bit of proprietary hardware that is not about the hardware, but about the experience.

This first iPad version is a placeholder—the even better versions will be released rapidly, by Apple and others, with cameras, multitasking, phone, and 3-D videoconferencing, over the next year or two.

But Apple has made the digital-product experience luscious, and attractive—which is likely to be good for most quality publishing.

Watching to see the uptake of this mode of invisible, nongeeky computing, and the iBookstore in particular, may indicate how rapidly we need to ramp up our ebook offerings for export to the world market.

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A Reader's Rumination

Michael Jensen | 02/22/2010

I had the pleasure of staying with my in-laws over the recent Christmas holidays. My father-in-law’s house abounds in books. After 35 years as the minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in Lincoln, Nebraska, he “retired”— and hosts a weekly book review show on the public television station, writes book reviews for the local paper, and still reads as if he’s studying for his profession of thoughtful observer of the human condition.

Consequently every coffee table and settee had some kind of recent intellectual apparatus: The New York Review of Books, the New York Times sections in all their literate forms, clippings from papers and magazines, and small stacks of intelligent, thoughtful journals.

I reveled in all that paper.

The printed matter allowed a kind of browsing I’ve done too little of, of late. I’ve been shifting gradually toward the digital-only for more than two decades, and now do virtually all of my professional browsing online.

But among that printed material, I was able to enter the world of letters again. Of literate bon mots, and pithy quotes. Of implicitly demonstrating how well-read one is, not how well one can Google. Of thoughtful, researched conclusions; of thoughtful, deep expertise in matters literary and philosophical.

It’s something I realized I’d been missing, online. Sure, there are marvels of analysis available digitally—and most of what was on that paper at my father-in-law’s is also available in digital form. But I’ve had no online hours that provided anything as distilled as the material I could randomly pick up around his house to read. I could delve, and browse, and read in-depth, and skim, and discover—and almost *everything* I picked up was interesting. It had been pre-distilled, pre-limited… it was only the good stuff. Even the ads were interesting—reminders of quality intellectual content from publishers of quality.

That whole ecosystem is something we may be losing,  because competition for online eyeballs doesn’t encourage textual constraints. And economic constraints make buying ads in the NYRB, or the NYT Book Review, or Harper’s, increasingly difficult to justify. And fewer people are willing to subscribe to paper artifacts every year. And book review sections are disappearing throughout the country, and literary reviews are in decline, and independent bookstores, like the main one in Lincoln, are closing nationwide.

My father-in-law often resold books he chose not to review to the community’s secondhand and independent bookstores, much to my chagrin as a publisher. But that’s part of the ecosystem too—and a way of giving books a longer life. Without that segment of the ecosystem, there’s less of an incentive for him to write reviews, since such writing pays piddling amounts….

The entire publishing ecosystem is tattering, because the new ecosystem of glibness, volume, repetition, search engine optimization, element-based monetization, transitory reputation, personal brand, virus-of-the-moment, and utter surfeit of raw material changes the nature of the competition. In that ecosystem, I must judge whether an article is worth reading… by reading it. In the old paper-based one, I could almost be sure an article was at least worthwhile.

I hope the best of what I experienced in my father-in-law’s literary space can be part of the human experience, as we shift to a mostly-digital intellectual ecosystem—characteristics such as assured quality, concentrated value, and distilled expertise. That runs counter to today’s Web rhythms, even as it runs parallel to what many people want.

However, the Web’s rhythms wax and wane, and it may be that—not unlike the decline of blogging (because there’s too much out there already)—curated content will make a resurgence in response to overabundance of information and underabundance of time.

As the flood of barely curated content becomes overbearing, we may shift back to where editorial oversight is valued again. If so, the products will still be increasingly electronic—but people will be more willing to pay for the value of curation. And we as publishers will still be able to pay our salaries.

My father-in-law’s children all went in together to get him a new Mac Cube to replace the clunker he’d been experiencing the Web through. So who knows—perhaps next Christmas there won’t be so much paper clutter around the house. But for him, I doubt it.

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