EPUB advice
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- This topic has 2 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 5 months ago by
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Hi.
I would like some advice from the experts (you guys) regarding EPUBS. I work for a very small publications company that sell physical education publications and manuals to teachers, students and schools. All of our publications are created using InDesign CC and everything we produce is currently in print format only (we print in-house).Basically I would like some advice on the best way to move forward regarding creating and distributing our publications in digital format. I don’t want to just export our publications as pdfs and distribute them like that but add some level of interactivity to the publications i.e. ability to play video and music content, maybe some basic animations. Would fixed layout EPUB be best suited for this type of content?
Regarding distribution I have no idea on how we would do this. At the moment it’s simple- the customer orders a publication, we print it and then send it to them along with the invoice. Regarding EPUBS we would probably want to sell them from our website, but again I could do with some advice on what would be the best route to take with how to sell and distribute EPUBS (our website is built using WordPress).
Any help / advice would be very welcome.
Thanks in advance.
Dan -
Hi Dan,
For the kind of interactive content you’re talking about, I believe epub3 (fixed layout) can handle it, but I’ll leave that part of the question to the design guys on here.
As for distribution, there are numerous options. You could set up your own separate publisher accounts with Amazon (Kindle) and ibook store etc., but we have chosen Ingram to distribute for us. Our title then go global to every major reader outlet – drawback is although set-up fees are very reasonable (US$25 an ebook), they take a big cut of royalties.
If you’re really new to this, remember a few basics, such as you’ll need a different ISBN for your ebook; avoid page numbers except on fixed epub3 and bear in mind some readers cannot yet cope with epub3, so you may need to create a separate reflowable epub for them. We produce academic textbooks too, and if you use diagrams these can be a nightmare on epub! We’ve started using Adobe Illustrator to make vector images so we can scale them correctly before they are rasterized and placed in the Ai file – this gives the best results we’ve found so far.
If you prefer to deliver content directly from your website, this can prove quite expensive, as you may need a new site, and you’ll certainly need an approved Adobe partner for best results. Last time I looked prices started at UK £2,500 per annum. I did find a much cheaper eBooks.com service for delivering from our site, but haven’t tried it yet, as it is not a priority for us.
Every success!
Mathew
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Hi Mathew
Thanks for replying. you’ve given me a lot to think about. Looks like it won’t be as straight forward as I initially thought, especially when you mentioned about diagrams being nightmare and avoiding page numbers. I may just have to stick to pdfs for the foreseeable future and see what options are available later on.
Thanks again.
Dan
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