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Choosing a Format for Your eBook

2011-09-13T10:37:00.000-07:00

So, you’ve finished your manuscript and you’re ready to become a successful author. Now all you have to do is work out where to go from here. Publishing an eBook certainly seems like a simpler way to get your book out there than going down the paper route. After all, turning your manuscript into a PDF and then selling it from your own website can’t be that hard, can it?

Well, that’s certainly the way that eBooks first got off the ground. But then the big guys jumped on the bandwagon and technology advanced just that little bit further. And now, if you want to be taken seriously as an independent author, you’re going to have to get your book onto one of those big guys’ sites.

Where to sell your eBook

Mainstream sellers of eBooks like the Amazon Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble Nook Books, Apple iBooks, and Sony Reader Store are the ones to target. They all have a portal for publishers (that’s you by the way – with eBooks, you become your own publisher) and you can either publish directly with each store or you can go through a distributor.

Distributors, or aggregators as they are sometimes known, are responsible for the conversion of your manuscript into one or more formats and for distributing your eBook to mainstream sellers. Now this brings us to the question of what format you should choose.

eBook formats

AZW, EPUB, PDF, MOBI, PRC…eBook formats may look like a series of Enigma codes, but could choosing the wrong one for your eBook affect how widespread the distribution of your eBook becomes?

There has been much discussion over which is the format of choice and which ones will rapidly become obsolete. And while there is a multitude of different eBook formats out there, there are four main ones that are being used by all the major retailers:

Portable Document Format (PDF)
Kindle Format (AZW)
Mobipocket Format (MOBI, PRC)
Epub Format (EPUB)

PDF

One of the most widely used formats for document exchange (and one that most people will have heard of), the PDF can be read by most computing devices. However, with the advance of technology, devices have become smaller and smaller and, while PDFs are still compatible, they ran into difficulties when devices such as Blackberrys and Palm Pilots required documents to be reflowed to fit their tiny screens.

It is a test for even the most patient of people to scroll horizontally as well as vertically to read a single page, let alone a whole book!

While in recent years, PDF technology has advanced, most non-Adobe readers cannot reflow documents. That’s not to say that PDFs are doomed to frustrate. There are some programs that allow reflow by generating temporary tags. Adobe has released a portable version of Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), which does just this. Many eBook readers now support ADE but the downside is that they do depend on zooming and panning the document. And zooming out to make the page fit is likely to make the text too small to read easily. So, not much of a temptation for your future readers.

AZW

Amazon’s Kindle Format is based on the Mobipocket format (which was purchased by Amazon in 2005). While the Kindle appears to be the current eReader of choice - it’s faster, lighter and eBooks can be downloaded in 60 seconds – you are of course restricted to selling your eBooks in this format from the Kindle Store. But as Amazon is probably the biggest seller of books and eBooks on the internet, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

MOBI, PRC

The Mobipocket format uses XHTML and is based on the Open eBook Standard (the predecessor to Epub). EBooks in this format can be read on the Kindle and on several other devices that support MOBI and PRC. They can also be read on devices running Mobipocket Reader, which is a free application from Mobipocket.

EPUB

The Epub (electronic publication) format is an open standard format, which means that it is free. Successor to the Open eBook Standard, it is the eBook format recommended and maintained by the International Digital Publishing Forum, which has a long list of respected members, including both book publishers and technology companies.

All in all, it is considered to be the industry standard file format for eBooks by the majority of the publishing industry, and is currently used by most eBook stores (with the exception of Amazon), including Google, whose entire library is formatted using Epub.

Epub: free formatting for ebooks

Although the four main formats covered here all have their advantages and disadvantages - PDFs perhaps have more disadvantages than the others - you can’t go far wrong in choosing one of these.

Amazon is perhaps the most popular store for buying books and eBooks alike and the Kindle eBook reader has many advantages in terms of technological advancement and user-friendly popularity. In this respect, you can always be assured of a large audience for your eBook. As Mobipocket can fairly easily be converted into the kindle format, the same applies here too.

However, with Epub: it’s free (always an incentive for someone publishing for the first time), it is considered the industry standard which lends it a lot of credibility, and most eBook stores use this format, giving you a wider choice of where to sell your eBook. While some may argue that the Kindle format is superior in its technology, Epub is most definitely catching up. Epub provides reflowable text and a page layout that can adjust itself to a device’s screen-size. You can style text and fonts and you can also embed multimedia files like colour images, interactive elements and full video! So it’s not so terribly behind.

So, go on…choose your format (or formats – throw caution to the wind!) and get your eBook out there. With the advent of eBook technology, there’s never been more of an opportunity for aspiring authors.

Next time we’ll be looking at how to go about formatting your manuscript for e-publication…

© Alice Bowden

From print to ebook

2010-07-07T03:49:00.000-07:00

Transforming books into ebooks isn't as just a question of scanning printed books and turning the OCR book copy into text files. The huge number of errors resulting from this process is leading publishers to despair that ebooks are all about "formatting"; while in fact they're about well-structured text with styles attached. For everything.
Read more here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/ebookstandards/

Can book publishers survive?

2010-01-20T11:06:00.000-08:00

The digitization of the book is occurring in many forms, but the two formats that are grabbing all the attention are fully-authored e-books and e-books compiled from "chunks" of other books. With non-fiction works, the market is increasingly moving towards the chunking of information. Going to Morocco? Why not access 10 different books and magazines to compile the perfect travel book for your interests? Pull together sections on history, culture, language, local restaurants, shopping opportunities, hotels (complete with offers) and so on? Download it to your PC, smartphone, or iPod. Access what you want, when you want, wherever you are. Information on the run – can book publishers be a part of this revolution?

Build-your-own Books

The ability to access limited sections or "chunks" of books for use in multi-media applications calls many established publishing concepts and traditions into question. As customers increasingly build their own "books", who is the "author"? This avid compiler, or the many original writers? Who would hold the copyright in such a work? Do terms such as "original" and "copies" still mean anything? Do the recognized geographical territories for rights hold good? Is the "original" the final, user-customized book - or its sources? Should such one-copy print runs be eligible to unique identifiers such as unique ISBN's? And does any of this matter?

Restructuring the Market

With authored e-books and self-built e-books, the questions seem never-ending. What can and should be protected? Who will aggregate the information, and handle the convergence across multi-platform devices? Even after reassigning rights, redistributing revenues, reconsidering contractual relationships, and solving all the logistical questions, of hardware, software and retailing, the question is: is it worth it? Is there money to be made?

The answer of course, is yes. But how?

Books Are Like Baked Beans After All

The answer lies in partnerships. A business model that has long been successful in other industries, but largely shunned by book publishers beyond magazine or newspaper serialization rights. Books have always been glorious, stand-alone products, seemingly representing the opposite of commercialism. The business side of publishing is largely untold, while the books themselves – those small islands of culture – are endlessly discussed. But the great potential of e-books lies with their interactivity – to other books, other readers, other products related to the content, other markets and more. In order to enter the next phase of publishing, book publishers will need to be seen as very much part of the commericial world, not standing apart from it.

In his essay, "The Processed Book", Joseph Esposito notes five important capabilities of e-books: as portals or front ends to other sources of information (pointers); as self-referencing texts; as platforms being "fingered" by other resources; as input processed by machines; and as nodes in networks.

E-books offer endless repackaging opportunities and the opportunity for strategic, lucrative partnerships. Consider their potential:

multimedia capabilities
hyperlinks within the e-book to Web content and reference tools (yours and others)
automatically or periodically updated content (the book need never become out of date)
automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation capabilities (you no longer have to sell foreign rights – you can "publish" straight to any market)
embedded instant shopping and ordering (of further information or products)
divergent, user-interactive, decision-driven plotlines 
community-built non-fiction books, with reader-contributed projects
interaction with other e-books using Bluetooth or the cloud
collaborative authoring and community activities
market information: databases of bookmarks, records of reading habits and shopping habits.

Potential Pitfalls
What are the drawbacks? E-texts are device-dependent (e-book readers or computer drives). They are format-specific; changes in technology - both in hardware and software - may initially render many e-books unreadable after a short space of time. Tagging and all forms of digital management are critical. Portability is hampered by battery life, lighting conditions, or the availability of appropriate infrastructure (such as electricity). But do they constitute the future of publishing? Only as the printing press defeated the hand-written manuscript.

Publishing 2010
By the end of 2010, the pundits are predicting that e-book sales for fiction will constitute at least 20% of the units moved for midlist and the lower tier of bestsellers, and at least 10% of the units for the really big bestsellers (illustrated books and children’s picture books will be slower to build). The recent experiment with “windowing” e-books — withholding them from release until several months after hardcover publication — will end, as publishers and agents realise that e-book sales (at any price) will spur print book sales (at any price), not cannibalize or discourage them. All business = more business.

Joining the Party
Book publishers simply cannot afford to do nothing – because the merchandising challenge for e-books will be met by websites, building them page by page, and offering the kind of value – both in original content and add-on services – that customers expect. These non-book publishers will cobble together products that would look absurdly amateurish in comparison with those produced by traditional publishers, who are the experts in structuring useable information.
But where are they?

What is user-centred design – and why do editors need to know about it?

2009-11-19T05:30:00.000-08:00

Book and magazine editors are used to mapping out design basics with designers, in terms of agreeing the basic template or structure for each spread. Once they've agreed the number of levels of heading, the number and type of feature boxes, pull quotes and everything else that lies beyond the main body of the text, they brief the author to write to these guidelines. At least, that's how it works in theory. (Unfortunately the design process often begins after the author's been commissioned, in which case the editor has the unhappy task of unpicking the text before pulling it back into its new shape, which is the equivalent of unpicking a Victorian costume and using the material to fashion a pair of jeans. Always interesting, but slightly nerve-wracking.)

Editors remodel the text to make it easier for the reader to find and read the information they want. And it works, to a certain extent, but in truth it's only a nod towards true user-centred design, because print products work largely on assumptions about readers, while websites offer hard data and instant feedback. And print readers are generous with their time, so the model only needs to be fairly user-friendly, while web users are always in a hurry, so if they can't grab and run, they just run. There's so much to look at, and so little time!

So what's the deal with user-centred design?
Outside of blogs and story-sites, web users scan and grab. They come to web sites to satisfy goals, do tasks, and get answers to questions. The web is such a fast-moving environment that the user – and his or her very particular needs and habits – dictates not only what kind of content a website will include, but also what it looks like, how it's organised, the tone of voice and even the kind of words that are used. Strike that – a successful website uses the exact vocabulary of its users.

This is essentially what "user-centred design" means – it means having an extremely clear idea of your users and their habits before you even begin to think about design or textual content, and then mirroring those demands. It means that it's not even worth starting to put together a website before you know:
• all your major audiences
• their main characteristics
• their questions and tasks
• their stories (where have they been and where are they going? Where are they sitting and what were they doing just before they accessed your site? Improvise scenarios for your users, and imagine them as you would in a narrative.)

Once the site is in process, constant usability testing will keep it on track, and when it's up and running, there's a plethora of analytical tools that will keep it focused. Think of the web as a long conversation with your user. Talk to them – and only them.

Can't I just guess what they want?
Setting up a website is like creating business on a busy city street. It takes time, money, imagination and nerve. It's a company's public face, worldwide. It's a place where anyone can wander in and see what the company is up to. In this sense, it's the retail arm of any business, and the whole world is window-shopping.

Imagine setting up a cafe for your users – you wouldn't be thinking only about the menu and the kind of food you want to cook, but also about everything else that would make your customers feel comfortable. First of all you'd make sure your cafe was in the right location and type of building for the kind of cooking you produce (design theme), with decent parking (accessibility). You'd think hard about the shop front and your window space (home page), where you'll work hard to tempt them in. You want them to feel at home when they enter, so they find exactly the kind of furniture, flooring and colours they feel at home with (design), and you'd make sure the first thing they'd receive is a greeting, followed by swift and efficient service. Which is why you hand them a menu (home page textual content) – listing what types of product you can offer. Once the dishes start flowing (the other levels of your website), you can relax slightly, while making sure you're still serving up what's been ordered. No more and no less. Don't cram too much food on the table, or ask them too many questions. You're looking to provide efficient, unobtrusive service, where the customer never has to wait, and you have pre-empted their every need.

User-centred website design is Michelin-starred service. It's that simple, and that hard to achieve.

Can Print Editors Do Digital?

2009-11-13T07:03:00.000-08:00

Editors have always loved to cut. It's our favourite pastime. Sure, we fiddle around with the author's words, rewriting here and there, but when it's time to get the text on the page, we do what we love to do. Cut, cut, cut.

Luckily, this trait turns out to be perfect for the web. Because while non-fiction print editing requires some pretty nifty cutting to fit, the web demands a ruthless amount of cutting. Everything has to be immediately obvious, both typographically and semantically. Readers have to be able to spot what they want on the page immediately, seeing and identifying what they want within milliseconds. If you make them pause to think, they're gone.

Readers Vs Users
Why the impatience? It seems that the big difference between print and web readers is that web readers aren't really 'readers' at all. They're users. This is the absolutely key thing to keep in mind. They don't want to browse around, losing themselves for a few minutes or hours in some delightful other world like print readers do. They want answers, fast. They've usually got a problem to solve, whether they're looking to buy something or get information. And they've got a tool available that works in a flash – we're all Googlers now – so if they visit your site and don't immediately see what they're looking for, you're history.

Managing Content
You may have the most comprehensive, expert and inspiring content in the world – but if the content hasn't been managed correctly (book editors: think spreads, chapters and indexing), the website (think a multi-layered, linked network of pages) won't get the readership/traffic it deserves.

This obsession with speed holds good even for social networking sites. Users don't want to spend time navigating to the right place. They want to get there, super fast, and get chatting. They want you, and your website, to effectively get out of the way – even while you're providing the service.

If book/magazine/news editing is low-key, web editing has to be invisible. The structure has to be so transparent as to literally disappear, leaving only what the user is actively looking for. This holds good for every page, every heading, every navigation tool. This is text pared to the limit.

Cutting Out The Questions
But all this is basically clarity and cutting – everyday meat to traditional editors. So far, so good. Another key task is to eliminate any questions, which can damage the speed of access. This is essentially a new version of 'the idiot test' that editors always run in their heads – i.e. is there anything in the text that makes me hesitate, re-read, or think 'huh?' Is there a pausing point? If so, it has to be changed, whether you're working in print or online. The big difference is the amount of time the reader/user will allow you to clarify what you mean. A print reader is in a musing frame of mind, and is relatively forgiving. But if a web user has to wonder "where am I?", "what should I click on first?", "where did they put…" or "have they got a…?", in all likelihood they'll give you the benefit of – at most – two of these questions, before they give up and dive off to a different site. And on the web a "question" can arise from virtually any word on the page – even the navigational headings. If the company wants to flag up a tab for 'Jobs', don't call it 'Employment Opportunities' or 'Positions Vacant'. Don't make them think, or they're gone.

So Can Editors Do Digital?
Scary? Slightly. Just think of it as a challenge. But can print editors do digital? Hell yes. They're the masters of content structure and clarity. They've long understood what readers want; they just need to adjust their sense of reader slightly (to that fast, intolerant user) and they're still streets ahead of anyone else handling web content.

So why aren't more print editors working on digital products? Perhaps because most websites belong to companies, who haven't necessarily grasped the fact that they're publishing. That web designers aren't interested in words, and that staff members aren't writers. Some companies haven't yet realised that their websites are not just shop windows, but corporate messaging, and a major point of interaction with their customers. That every web page says something about the company – its values, its care (of customers, products, and own image) and its attention to detail. Every website has a voice – and that voice needs to be right. The words on the page are speaking to the user, and they have to reflect the right character for the company. A large corporate requires a wholly different set of language and tone to a youth-focused independent. Who's going to bring in that consistency of message, if not an editor? Certainly not a web designer, or even the marketing department of a company.

With more and more websites fighting to get to the top of the search engines, it's not just about keywords and tags any more; and even frantic work on the social networking sites won't save a carelessly-worded website. Speaking naturally in the right way to a particular audience about what they want to hear is now the most effective way to automatically pare down the words for both the core audience and the google spiders.

So if there are any print editors out there wondering whether to take the leap into digital – go for it. Your skills have never been more sorely needed.