Comment by redman25
2 years ago
I worked for a publisher for about 10 years as a typesetter and ebook developer. There are a lot of things about the publishing industry that are antiquated, especially for non-technical publishing companies. Unfortunately it's a low margin business.
Most authors are only familiar with Microsoft Word, so on the front end you often have to take a messily styled Word document and manually caress it into a structured document that can be used for ebooks and print.
For print, a majority of non-technical publishers use Adobe InDesign and/or InCopy. Editors edit manuscripts in InCopy and typesetters style documents for print. PDFs are generally exported and sent to printers via FTP.
For ebooks, every publisher seems to have their own bespoke system. You _can_ export books in epub format from InDesign but the process for getting a clean ebook is difficult to say the least since InDesign was primarily designed for print publications. Generally, you end up structuring books for the lowest common denominator of ebook platform (epub, kindle, etc.) unless you are creating something like a children's book or a poetry book where you might do something more custom.
Many publishers use ebook distribution platforms where you upload epub, mobi, cover images via FTP. They use an XML standard called ONIX for distributing metadata that's unique to say the least...
I oversee ebook production for a university press publisher, and indeed, our typesetters have to do some pre-processing of our authors' Word files before typesetting (we do all editing and copyediting in Word), and then post-processing of the Indesign output to get acceptable ebook files. There are some plugins that will help. Indesign, left to its own devices, will give you garbage.
Our sales vendors all check the files with epubcheck. If it doesn't pass, they'll bounce it.
> You _can_ export books in epub format from InDesign but the process for getting a clean ebook is difficult to say the least since InDesign was primarily designed for print publications.
I wonder if that's why so many, and even relatively new, ePubs feel a lot like poorly OCRed PDFs?
It generally seems like most publishers and I have opposite goals when it comes to ePubs: They want them to look and feel as much like the physical book as possible (by including custom fonts, applying custom margins/padding etc.), while I want absolutely none of that.
It's frustrating having to fight the publisher to get something readable on a small display or non-Kindle ePub reader, and I don't even want to get started on dark mode...
There are two kinds of epub layouts, reflowable (the good kind) and fixed-page (the badly OCR'd feeling kind). Most print designers who don't follow best practices in turn don't do the work required to make InDesign output reflowable epubs.
Reflowable epubs in InDesign require discipline that a lot of print designers (and even some full-time typesetters) lack. You have to use a single content flow (all text must be linked between text frames in one unbroken flow), any images and sidebars must be anchored in that flow (you can't just freely place them on the page), and you have to consistently use paragraph and character stylesheets (i.e. you can't just ctrl-B embolden text, etc., you have to create/use a "Bold" character sheet).
It's hard to call that "difficult" because those are already best practices for print, but they aren't intuitive to most people and InDesign doesn't make it easy to track how much of this you're doing correctly or flag which parts you've done wrong.
FWIW I’ve published a few of my own books. I write them in latex to get perfect print ready pdfs, then pan doc gives me flawless epub files, all from the same source.
It works really well
Any special LaTeX packages you are using?
Here's my process http://theroadchoseme.com/how-i-self-published-a-professiona...
1 reply →
Not OP but I basically do the same thing (except the epub part) and the secret is to use XeTeX, since it allows you to use modern fonts.
This is extremely helpful information [0]. Thank you.
[0] I'm currently working on a new language for writing books.
Is noone using Apple‘s Pages app? I hear it‘s decent for creating EPUB files.