The iPad as a comic-book reader. Tablets, led by the iPad, have the potential to shake up the comic-book industry even more than ebook readers have begun to change the world of prose books. Large, portable color screens are perfect for reading comics. They’ve got a portability that desktop and laptop PCs can’t match, and of course they show off the source material in a way that small black-and-white Kindle screens can’t. The original iPad started the revolution, and the Retina display on both the third- and fourth-generation iPad provided dramatically improved image quality.
Larger Android tablets such as Google’s Nexus 10 have also joined the party. When the iPad was first released, I found it to be an excellent (albeit imperfect) comic-book reader. Flimsy “funnybooks” There are a few different options when it comes to reading comics on the iPad or other tablets, and in some ways they parallel the choices that comic readers face in the printed comic market. Wait for the trade Netflix for comics Marvel Comics Excelsior!
CSS and XHTML Tags for ePub - Rufus Deuchler. ePub is the electronic version of a publication that has been optimized for on-screen viewing. Essentially it is a file format for publishing eBooks, which is rapidly becoming a standard (see International Digital Publishing Forum). There is a lot of interest around this format because text and images flow in a continuous flow, and can adapt to any size of screen, from your mobile phone, to you tablet, or personal computer. The first lesson in ePub is that designer and publishers have very little control over the formatting of their eBooks. The rules are very strict, and are mainly based on CSS and XHTML, as far as formatting is concerned. Much of that formatting can be done with Adobe InDesign by scrupulously applying paragraph and character styles, which will be exported in a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) in the ePub. Out of the box, ePubs created with InDesign work, and can be published as are, but there are many things a designer or publisher can do to tweak the CSS and the XHTML.
An Introduction to HTML and CSS for EPUB by Carolyn McNeillie on Prezi. ePub eBooks: Information on what they are, where to get them, and how to make them yourself - Jedisaber.com. Original Content:Home | Books | eBooks | Other | Links | Fan Content: Andromeda | Avatars | Anime | Dark Angel | Matrix | Pern | Stargate | Star Trek | Star Wars This section hosts eBooks in the IDPF .epub format, reviews of software programs to read and create ePub books, and a tutorial on how to make books in that format. Resources: Books - Books in the .epub format for you to download and read, as well as links to other sites on the internet where you can get books in the .epub format.
Reviews of ePub Reading Software - Want to read ePub books on your PC, iPad or other device? Reviews of programs that make ePub books - Don't like to manually edit XML files? Manual Tutorial: How to un-zip an ePub file and manually edit the files inside it. Introduction - What is ePub? Note: ePub version 3 is out now, but no reader software yet supports it. Sigil Tutorial: How to edit eBooks using Sigil.
The music industry dropped DRM years ago. So why does it persist on e-books? So maybe you were lucky enough to get an e-reader for the holidays. In fact, maybe you’re reading this article on one right now! Maybe you’re cozying up to your fire and you’re considering what e-book you want to download to get through these dark winter days. But you’re an Ars reader, and you actually know (and care!) What DRM stands for. After all, we’ve been covering digital rights management for years, ever since it was a contentious issue in the music industry. And that leaves this question: where’s the DRM outrage over e-books? For many industry watchers, it comes down to the fact that generally speaking, most people own more individual pieces of music than they do individual books—the American digital music market is still much bigger than the digital book market. From a cultural standpoint, people want to put music on more devices than they do e-books, and some will want to remix that music.
The "wrong end of the stick" ? A rather cozy birdcage Looking to the Cloud. Sigil resets edits to content.opf. Five improvements iBooks Author needs to make. I build books for a living. My primary job here at Macworld is editing how-to ebooks written by editors on staff, our frequent contributors, and even myself. It’s also, on occasion, one of the most infuriating tasks I’ve ever taken on. Not the editing or the writing—no, my troubles come from the process of making the books. Apple’s iBooks Author software tries to deal with some of my issues with ebook-making, removing the need to know HTML/CSS and letting you build books that look the same on your iPad as they do in the app. But though I was excited by iBooks Author’s release, I struggle to use it in our ebooks business. You’d think it would be a no-brainer: Mac software that creates beautiful books for the iPad. Ebooks? I’ve griped often about the pain of building ebooks for multiple platforms, and I’m not expecting iBooks Author to suddenly allow me to build a beautiful multitouch book for the Kindle.
But iBooks Author already has a “reflowable” (resizable text) mode: portrait mode. Adobe ADEPT DRM for EPUB circumvented - 75. Add ADE page-template file | EBW Knowledge Base. Adobe developed its own extra stylesheet for controlled the margins of pages and the point at which widening the screen causes a body of text to split into two or more columns. This stylesheet has the extension XPGT for XML Page Template. It is not required by the epub specification, but can give you some extra control over the appearance of the epub in ADE. When you export to epub from InDesign, a basic XPGT file is included in the epub’s OEBPS folder, and referenced in the relevant XHTML files that follow it. You can edit the XPGT if you like. For more information on editing the XPGT file, see this article from Adobe. Adding an XPGT file from scratch You can also add an XPGT file if your epub doesn’t have one (e.g. if you didn’t get here via InDesign). 1. 2. 3.
Are Digital Textbooks The Wave of The Future or Simply a New Jobs Program for Textbook Publishers? I had an unfortunate accident this weekend. A couple thoughts, which had been circling my mind, happened to collide in a most pleasant way. After thinking for another day 0r so I came to a new viewpoint on digital textbooks that both explains what I think is really going on and is deeply depressing. A couple weeks back I happened across a story about the State of NY debating whether to drop the current GED test. It seems that NY had outsourced running the test to a contractor, which has recently been bought by Pearson, and that contractor had announced that the cost of running the test would double next year.
Pearson has announced changes to the exam, planned for 2014, that will roughly double its price and could limit its access. I suppose it should be obvious that someone was running the testing on behalf of the state, but that was a detail I had not thought of until I read the story above. Pearson, as you probably know, is heavily invested in the digital textbook startup Inkling. Flightcrew - A better epub validator. How to Prepare Images for InDesign or PDF to Book Using Adobe® Photoshop® Once you’ve calibrated your monitor and installed the Blurb ICC Profile, you are ready to prepare your images for Adobe InDesign or PDF to Book. For information about image prep for Blurb BookSmart®, see How to Prepare Images for Blurb BookSmart using Adobe Photoshop. For Adobe InDesign or Blurb’s PDF to Book workflow we recommend that final submitted images be placed into your page layout application in the CMYK color space.
In addition to your images all graphics and page layout elements should be created in the CMYK color space to ensure greatest color accuracy of your printed book. There are two options for working with images within a color-managed workflow: Option 1: Working in RGB – Soft proofing, converting to CMYK, and saving.Option 2: Working in CMYK – Soft proofing and saving.
Editing and adjusting images in RGB Figure 1. Figure 5. This workflow assumes you have Adobe Photoshop® to edit and convert your images. What We Can Do with “Books” (Liza Daly) Liza Daly is Vice President of Engineering at Safari Books Online. Previously, she was owner of Threepress Consulting, where she provided strategy and software for publishers, authors, and vendors. In 2008, she developed Bookworm, one of the first open-source EPUB readers, and in February of 2010 released Ibis Reader™, the first HTML5 ebook platform. Liza is on the Board of Directors for the International Digital Publishing Forum. You can find Liza on Twitter at: @liza. You can do a lot of things with a paper book. You can read it. You can make notes in it. But what can you do with a digital book? In the nascent electronic book era, much of the discussion covers what you can’t do.
Many of these limitations have nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of a digital book, but are instead a reflection of the difficult transition between an old, established medium and a new, to-date undeveloped one. Ebooks do not have to be mere simulacra of printed works. The Opportunity to Upgrade Explore. Threepress Consulting blog. Mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit. ePub Zen Garden. Dublin Core. The Dublin Core Schema is a small set of vocabulary terms that can be used to describe web resources (video, images, web pages, etc.), as well as physical resources such as books or CDs, and objects like artworks.[1] The full set of Dublin Core metadata terms can be found on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) website.[2] The original set of 15 classic[3] metadata terms, known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set[4] are endorsed in the following standards documents: IETF RFC 5013[5]ISO Standard 15836-2009[6]NISO Standard Z39.85[7] Dublin Core Metadata may be used for multiple purposes, from simple resource description, to combining metadata vocabularies of different metadata standards, to providing interoperability for metadata vocabularies in the Linked Data cloud and Semantic Web implementations.
Background[edit] Levels of the standard[edit] The Dublin Core standard originally includes two levels: Simple and Qualified. [edit] Example of code[edit] [edit] Syntax[edit] See also[edit] Text Encoding Initiative. Official logo The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities, operating continuously since the 1980s. The community currently runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and maintains an eponymous technical standard, a wiki, a SourceForge repository and a toolchain. The TEI Guidelines[edit] The TEI Guidelines, which collectively define an XML format, are the defining output of the community of practice. The format differs from other well-known open formats for text (such as HTML and OpenDocument) in that it's primarily semantic rather than presentational; the semantics and interpretation of every tag and attribute are specified. Some 500 different textual components and concepts (word,[1] sentence,[2] character,[3] glyph,[4] person,[5] etc.); each is grounded in one or more academic discipline and examples are given.
Technical Details[edit] TEI Lite is an XML-based file format for exchanging texts. Verse[edit] Study: It's Easier (For Some) to Read on LCD Screens Than in a Paper Book. I have long held the position that LCD screens aren’t as evil as everyone claims, and that the belief that E-ink is better for you eyes is a myth. Now there is new evidence that reading on an LCD screen device like the iPad or Kindle Fire might actually take less mental effort. A team of researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, have recently published a paper which shows that in spite of claims to the contrary, it was easier for a test group to read on an LCD screen.
What’s more, the test group also showed approximately the same retention of the reading material, no amter whether they read on LCD, an ereader, or on paper. Dr. Matthias Schlesewsky and his colleagues tested a group of 57 Gen X and senior citizens for this study. The test subjects were strapped into a rig that tracked their eye movements and measured their brain waves using an EEG (electroencephalogram) machine.
Interesting, no? Paper source. What Will the History Textbook of the Future Look Like? | NeilSchlager.com. I was recently interviewed by an industry analyst for Outsell about the higher education textbook industry. One of the things we discussed was where the textbook is going. Here are some of the elements I identified in that discussion, at least as they relate to history textbooks: It will be native digital. It will be Web-based. What about Price? In the past few years, there has been a lot of time and money spent on the creation of free, open textbooks (or OER, for “open educational resources”) from companies like Flat World Knowledge and nonprofits like OpenStax.
However, I feel that experimental digital textbook services of the future are more likely to come from for-profit entities, given the investment needed and the longer-term commitment required to improve and enhance the services over time. When Will the Future Arrive? As the creator of Milestone Documents, a service that is built suspiciously close to the specs listed above (imagine that!) PaperC.de - Your platform for online textbooks. ReadWrite is Wrong: Pay-As-You-Read E-Bookselling Does Work.
Have you caught the post on Read Write today about TotalBoox? If you have not read it, don’t bother. The article is wrong, and I can show you why. In that article the author, Antone Gonsalves, argues that the pay-as-you-read startup TotalBoox won’t amount to anything. The tl;dr version is: readers won’t want to pay a fractional price for a fractional book,publishers also won’t want to receive a fractional payment for that fractional read, andthe average ebook price is too low to make this a viable business model That is a compelling argument – except for the fact it is at best only half true. If pay-as-you-read isn’t a viable business model then someone forgot to tell PaperC. If you’re not familiar with PaperC, let me offer some background on how they operate. Visitors can browse the PaperC website without having to register. I won’t go through the entire flowchart (you can find out more here), but I will note that PaperC sells by the chapter and page.
How exactly does that model not work? Day One- Friars Lane Digital Services. Fonts should be the foundational choice for an ebook design Unfortunately, anyone who as ever tried to develop an ebook that uses embedded fonts has discovered a mess. The biggest problem is you have no way of knowing whether or not the ereader device will turn your fonts off by default. I've read entire books thinking that the formatting was screwed up, only to discover that if I had just enabled my Kindle's "Publisher Fonts On" for that book, it would looked great. At Friars Lane, we knew we had to fix that problem to make the rest of our plans work. Here's what we came up with. If your ereader opens one of our books with publisher fonts disabled, you will see a screen like this (actual screenshot from my trusty old Kindle Keyboard): If the ereader opens with publisher fonts enabled or after the user enables them, the message disappears.
This is an actual screenshot of my Kindle displaying the same page as above, after I turned on publisher fonts: Friars Lane- Friars Lane Digital Services. Authors Abusing Readers. The Professional Chef by the Culinary Institute of America - Official Cooking and Recipes Textbook. The New Sunset Western Garden Book now available on iOS. Results for Digital Reading Room. Tweaking ePubs: It's just a ZIP file!