Joshua Tallent (eBook Architects, now Firebrand Technologies)
The new Kindle Fire HD tablets and the exciting advancements in fixed layout capabilities available in KF8 have expanded the digital options for publishers with complex book designs. This workshop will cover the process of creating all of the different kinds of enhanced fixed layout files in the KF8 system, including children’s, comics, and non-fiction.
Building eBooks seems to be the real big deal at this year’s TOC. eBooks seem to be not very complex if you’re coming from the web environment. Understand the CSS for eBooks and voila.
My first session at TOC2013
You still need to test the output on each device. However, a good source is ePub. From the workshop, it really seems that building eBooks is really a piece of cake if you know regular expressions, HTML, CSS and some other things web people are usually mastering. However, it does not seem super easy if you’re brand new to this world…
Amazon is focusing on helping publishers. Joshua loves what Amazon is doing in regards to publishers. He also fully supports the variety of proprietary formats of eBooks to use the platform at most. An eBook is basically an embedded website.
The various platforms you need to support really makes it difficult for publishers to actually support the variety of eBook readers. This explains the number of startups trying to sell platforms for distributing those books around. Publishers have to really get into a new tech world which is so far from publishing world. I am not aware of all the constraints you have when going to print, but sending a PDF to your printer. Why are such things so complex?