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A better ePub

Given that Smashwords will create an ePub file for us, from the Word document, why do we prefer to do this from InDesign?

The answer lies in how we create the file in InDesign. Rather than have one big file for the whole publication, we use InDesign's 'Book' feature. With this, you have a separate file for each chapter (plus, we use separate files for the title page, copyright page, etc), all managed from the book document.

When you output the ePub file, InDesign builds it in such a way that there are links created to each section. This is best explained in images. Here's the Lady Caine ePub e-book created via Smashwords, viewed in Adobe Digital Editions. Note the section on the left.

Now here's the ePub version we created via InDesign.

Note how the left-hand section has links to the separate chapters. It's like an automatic contents page.

Formatting with Word

We need to deal with some formatting issues you might encounter with your Word document. Like the web, e-books present a challenge for designers who are used to controlling every aspect of the look and feel of a document.

E-readers are designed to give a great deal of control to the reader - how large the type is, and so on. But even if you keep formatting to a minimum, you may be in for some surprises when using a service like Smashwords, or Amazon DTP, or even when creating your own files with InDesign.

For a start, blank lines are stripped out. Gone. If you were using blank lines to separate sections of text, think again.

Our Word and InDesign templates are designed so that the text we flow into them has no blank lines at all. To provide space between text, we use paragraph styles. For example, in the following snippet from Lady Caine, the space between the chapter heading and the following text is achieved by creating a ChapterHead paragraph style with a 'space after' setting of 36pt.

Similarly, to separate sections of text, we created a TextBreak paragraph style, applied to a line of three asterisks, with 'space before' and 'space after' settings of 30pt.

That's why our Word and InDesign templates have a lot of paragraph styles.

If you try applying text centering, right-align or character attributes like bold and italics, you may find these don't work in the e-book file unless you define them as part of the paragraph or character style.

For example, let's say you have a 'BodyText' paragraph style which is normally ranged-left, roman font. If you just click the 'align right' button on Word's toolbar, it'll align right in Word, but will still be aligned left in the e-book. What you need to do is create a new paragraph style called, say, 'BodyTextRight' and apply that.

Similarly, if you highlight a word and click the button to make it bold, it won't be bold in the e-book. Instead, you'll need to create a character style in which bold is selected and apply that.

The Smashwords Style Guide advises against creating multiple paragraph styles, but we've simply ignored this and it's worked fine for us. That said, the simpler you can make your book, the easier a time you'll have during production.

OpenOffice issues

Finally, a warning: not all Word files are equal. When we started using Smashwords, we were outputting Word (.doc) files from OpenOffice, our preferred WP. This largely seemed to work except for some irritating faults. In spite of all those carefully created paragraph formats, text that we'd centered or right-aligned in the Word file were still left-aligned in the ePub document created by Smashwords. And there were other, smaller glitches.

Now, Microsoft is very secretive about the details of the .doc format, and so OpenOffice has had to reverse engineer it. It occured to me that maybe they hadn't got it quite right.

And so it seems.

The same file, loaded into Word and resaved, now works as expected. You may find similar issues with other word processing packages that claim to output Word files.

Resources:

• Smashwords Style Guide
• Amazon DTP formatting guides
• Lulu eBook FAQ

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E-books show all the signs of conforming to Cringeley's Law. Formulated by pundit Robert X Cringeley, this states that the initial uptake of new technologies is often surprisingly slow - much slower than we have any reason to expect - yet the long-term impact can be immense.

I think we may be at a transitional stage. The Kindle has been with us for a while now and has largely been little more than an object of curiousity or even contempt. Until, that is, this Xmas. As far as we can tell (Amazon keeps its sales figures to itself), it sold in large numbers over the gift-giving season. That resulted in Amazon selling more e-books than print books on Christmas Day.

Now we have the Nook and countless other e-readers. Apple's tablet computer, possibly dubbed the iSlate, is expected to be announced on 27 January, and Apple is in talks with HarperCollins, presumably to sell books for the device. These may well prove to be 'augmented' books, with additional content, much as DVDs now come with extras. And there are rumours that Apple is also doing deals with newspapers, including the New York Times.

The technology is advancing, too. Electronics firm LG has shown off a 19in flexible electronic ink screen. And Skiff has used a smaller, 11.5in version of this on its new reader. Such devices may answer the question "what's the future for newspapers and magazines".

Everywhere you look, publishers and content owners are cutting deals for electronically delivered content.

We're in a process that is so common that one analyst company has even given it a name. Gartner calls it the Hype Cycle. I think Gartner's model is a little too rigid (it has to be because that's the only way the company can 'own' the phrase and use it to promote itself). But this is my interpretation of it (the names given to the phases are Gartner's):

1. Technology Trigger: the new technology appears and generates lots of interest, even if people don't necessarily understand how to use it or why they'd want to.
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations: early adopters wet their pants and talk about how this is the future. There are, perhaps, a few high-profile successes, but most people look on bemused. Many pundits will pontificate about how "it will never catch on" or "that's not the way people like to read/watch TV/listen to music/etc".
3. Trough of Disillusionment: the technology fails to live up to the initial excitement. It doesn't catch on, often because the technology itself wasn't quite ready (think about the first mobile phones with short battery lives, lousy sound quality, poor geographical coverage, etc). The pundits proclaim they were right all along. Most people forget the technology exists or consign it to the hell of 'only for geeks'.
4. Slope of Enlightenment: while most of us have given up, the more forward-looking among us continue to explore the technology. In e-publishing, this might equate to those publishers building business models and distribution methods around e-books. Those who maintain the faith get to understand the technology and how best to use it.
5. Plateau of Productivity: suddenly, everyone wakes up to the fact that the technology has benefits after all. Gartner's model is geared to business technologies - hence the emphasis on 'productivity'. In a wider context, you might call this the 'plateau of acceptance', or 'plateau of ubiquity', or something equally pompous. This is where ordinary people - not just geeks and the trendy - see the value of the technology. In most cases, the technology itself will have advanced. Shortly after the technology arrives on the plateau, it's everywhere and people can't remember how they got along without it.

We're definitely in stage 4 and maybe about to hit that final plateau. The people who succeed in e-publishing will be those who held faith and got on with the task of making it work, technically and from a business perspective.

Excuses for not embracing e-publishing - such as "people like to read real books" or "you can't use an e-reader in the bath" - will sound increasingly hollow and silly (much like saying, "but all my music collection is on 78s").

It's also partly a generational thing, of course. This may be the last generation to have such a strong relationship with paper. In fact, that generation is already in decline, as today's kids develop stronger relationships with their phones, their computers and - perhaps - their tablet devices. It's possible that it won't be long before books seem quaint. "Where are the web links?" kids may ask, or "How do I search the text?".

What does this mean for writers who self-publish? Well, my approach is this - develop your book for the screen, not the page.

Most writers (and publishers, for that matter) still view the printed book as the end product of their work. If they're smart, somewhere along the line they also start thinking about an e-book edition. If they're not so smart, then once work has been completed on the print version, they'll have a moment of panic and somehow crank out an e-book version.

Today, I think that's the wrong way around. Start with the e-book. Why? Because that makes you think about what additional content or features you might be able to provide. At the very least, with an e-book there's an opportunity to embed web links in the text. There are also some limitations with design when producing e-books (I'll deal with this in a forthcoming post). If you don't allow for this, producing an e-book edition of your print book may be unnecessarily difficult. The InDesign template I've created for our books, at WebVivant Press, is geared to e-books, but works just as well for print.

I think we're now nearing the stage where the e-book will be the default format, with perhaps print versions available as an alternative for those who want them (with such sales fulfilled using POD technology). Rather than lamenting the decline of the book, why not celebrate the coming of age of a new and exciting form of sharing knowledge and enlightenment?