Would love a course on creating eBooks for iPad (ePub format) and other tablets, separate from Digital Magazine (PDF) courses, but covering the same inDesign related material/workflow (Rich Media Foundations, Basic Interactivity, Adding Audio/Video, Advanced Interactivity, Deploying and Distributing) uniquely from the standpoint of ePub.

It seems to me that the ePub market is potentially much larger than the Digital Magazine market; there's a finite number of magazines, but an unlimited number of people toiling in home offices/small businesses who want to create eBooks for iPad, other tablets, and Kindle. Especially interested in finding out about deploying ePub formatted multimedia books to iPad and other tablets without having to go through Adobe or some super-expensive, always-escalating service like Roving Bird?

Right now as guardaroba says, the lines between teh two are blurred. Sure Adobe is raking in teh dough from Martha Stewart and all those big magazine clients, but the real numbers, it would seem to me, are in self-publishing/small publisher ePub platform eBooks — all the issues that are different than print, with an emphasis on multimedia and design.

There is simply no dedicated training out there that I can find.

Yes, I subscribe to Lynda, already completed the inDesign CS5.5 New Features course. The instructor is great, but the course focus leaves a lot to be desired. It suffers from the same issue this thread raised: a general muddling of Digital Magazine & ePub. Check the course out for yourself. It's an overview, not an in-depth look, which is normal since the release just occured. However, what I find frustrating is that no one — Adobe or other parties — seem to understand that Digital Magazines and ePub eBooks are two different markets.

It's my understanding, after watching Terry White's tutorials, that CS5.5 now allows us to generate full-fledged, multimedia ePub eBooks for iPad/other tablets without having to program, then deploy them without having to go through a lot of expense. It seems that the CS5.5 allows us to do this, but nobody is putting any efort into the various ways these two solutions are different and what those differences mean in terms of using inDesign for each specific purpose.

Anne-Marie,

How gracious of you to step in. I've followed your work over time, on Lynda and on Adobe. You're truly one of the experts.

I did watch part of your CS5 tutorial, but determined that CS5 wouldn't allow us to do the multimedia, design-rich books we wanted to do. So we set about programming the whole thing. Then, when CS5.5 was announced, we figured, from what we saw in the Terry White and other literature, that we could do most of what we wanted (without the Digital Magazine stuff, which we also explored) with the new 5.5 release.

We have a children's book and a sports book that we want to produce for the multimedia tablets (iPad and others) in the first instance only. We want to include interactivity, multimedia, and design. Right now, however, we're confused as to how much programming effort and which tools we'll need. At first, we thought inDesign 5.5 might do it all, but now, from the response on this forum, we're having to revise our hopes. We have almost all the assets; they conform to standards: mp3, mp4, etc.

Nevertheless, there seems to be some confusion, even in the Adobe camp, as to what tools we need to create/view/deploy content. i.e., Adobe Digital Editions is broken. Not sure about what's replacing it, etc.

As for...

The lines are definitely blurring but there is no way you're going to get the layout control and interactivity of a tablet app into EPUB format, at least not in the next year or two.

...it would seem to be relatively easy for the programming staff at Adobe or other organization to create tools for laying out eBooks for (ePub or other tablet platforms) and once they're well laid out, simply pushing a button to render out fully operational multimedia eBooks, just as we now grind out PDF for print books. No one talks about programming PDF any more; it's simply occurs behind the scenes. If it's going to take two years to move eBooks onto the same footing, that's an awful lot of lost business. There are thousands of small publishers (we're one) and self-publishers waiting for these tools, and someone is going to create them. Adobe has a head start, but look what Google did with Blogger; they leap-frogged WordPress. The same kind of user-friendly tools must be in the offing in some entrepreneurial establishment.

Can't wait for you CS5.5 Lynda tutorial, and, in the meantime, will go through your complete CS5 offering.

Check out Liz Castro blog.

http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2010/07/epub-straight-to-point-epub- version.html

I'd also get my hands on her epub "Epub Straight to the point"

Both the epub and the blog site are invaluable.

Think of the ePub format, and its adaptions a such as .mobi, as basically HTML in an XML container and supplying content for eReaders  such as the Sony eReader, the Kindle and the Nook.  These are suitable for simple one-column text-centric books with few illustrations and the text is reflowable so you don’t have pages as such. These formats are ideal for simply designed books, such as novels, biographies and so on.

ePub is not suitable for highly designed books with lots of integrated illustrations, sidebars and so on, for which you’d use a format such as PDF or the newer formats designed for tablets. Often publishers produce two versions for these devices; one for portrait and one for landscape.

Derek

Thanks Bob and Derek. I'm going to start laying out my books as per Anne-Marie's Lynda course.

Again, from what you're saying, CS5.5 really doesn't allow the multimedia features that the Terry White videos say it does. So the 5.5 Terry White tutorial demos were really programmed? None of the features can be easily implemented?

Anne-Marie, a priori, I don't disbelieve anything Terry says. It was only after I started asking questions on this forum and having people tell me that the Terry White videos exaggerated the capabilities of CS5.5 that I began to question same.

I'm an open vessel; I know nothing, except that I've used Quark, Framemaker, inDesign to lay out print books since 1990. I was working for Apple at the time. Now I have a publishing company. About six months ago we decided to do no more print books, just concentrate on iPad high-design, multimedia books. Since then we have been exploring the capabilities of various tools. Hoping that some vendor would eventually give us drag-and-drop, plug-and-play, one-button from computer to ePub for iPad, we took our time.

It's very hard to get accurate, top-down info so that we can make good decisions. Each time I tell some what we're trying to do, I get different, conflicting answers. It seems to me that Adobe should be evangelizing the ePub to iPad workflow around the clock.

What we want to do: We want to produce of the design-intensive, multimedia iPad eBooks, not Digital Magazines, not Kindle, not anything that can't be leveraged from the iPad version. We'd like tools that give us the most features and control — like the examples we see in the Terry White overviews — for the least amount of programming. The most control so that what we see on the iPad looks like what we see on the computer screen.

Right now, this sector seems to be stuck in a situation similar to the one when I worked for Apple, the situation with the Postscript printer language. We'd have to print to a Postscript file and had no way of seeing what we'd get. Lots of intermediate steps. Little by little, this process became less opaque, more streamlined. We now have inDesign export direct to PDF so we can skip all the intermediate steps. This will happen in the eBook world. Sooner or later. someone, perhaps Adobe, perhaps not, will come up with a drag-and-drop, plug-and-play toolkit so that non-technical, one/two/three-person small shops — writer/illustrator/designer — can create beautiful iPad eBooks without programming.

In the meantime, we need straight answers. Hopefully, your upcoming CS5.5 for ePub course will provide them:

1. Layout and Testing

Layout choices

Style choices

Content and text flow

Design elements

Embeding audio in a graphic

Audio/video

Testing/viewing documents/layouts

Horizontal/vertical issues

TOC issues

Uploading to iPad

Using the layout to manage content flow

Using XML tags to manage content

Naming styles and linked assets

Modifying Text and Images for EPUB Export

Cleaning up the text flow

Applying paragraph and character styles

Modifying nested, GREP, and line styles

Modifying tables

Converting InDesign graphics

Manually optimizing images

Creating a cover image

Adding a custom TOC as the first page of an EPUB file

Adding metadata to an InDesign file or book

2. Exporting to EPUB

Choosing general EPUB export options

Choosing EPUB export options for images

Choosing EPUB export options for contents

3. Previewing and Validating EPUB Files

Previewing EPUBs on your computer and devices

Previewing for the iBooks app

Validating EPUB

4. Editing EPUB Files for Functionality

Getting inside an EPUB file

Identifying parts of an EPUB

Choosing an EPUB editor

Modifying the navigational TOC

Adding and editing metadata

Creating guide sections for iBooks

4. Editing EPUB Files for Formatting

Cleaning up the XHTML files

Cleaning up the CSS file

Setting spacing in the file

Creating drop caps

Creating sidebars and pull quotes

Setting text wrap rules

Creating links

5. Converting EPUB Files to Other ebook Formats

Preparing your EPUB file for Kindle conversion

Converting with KindleGen and Kindle Previewer

Using the Kindle plug-ins for InDesign

Converting for other resellers

6. Distributing Your ebook

Getting an ISBN for each edition

Getting your ebook into the Kindle Store, iBookstore, or NOOKbook Store

Using third-party aggregators

Selling from your own web site or eCommerce site

JJ Semple

PS. I'm enjoying your CS5 course, looking forward to the CS5.5 update.

BobLevine wrote:

 

Again, DPS and EPUB are two completely different animals...and you don't have to create two orientations. If you don't, however, you won't get the automatic change when you rotate the tablet. I recently did a job for a major publisher and they elected to have one orientation only. How many people really rotate the tablet when they're reading?

 

EPUB is very much like the web. The text adapts and flows according to the view port. DPS is a fixed layout. The designer chooses everything.

 

It's certainly very labor intensive but it's not ridiculous and until you start working with it and get comfortable with the disconnect between some native ID feature and the limitations of the tablets, you're not likely to see why things are the way they are.

 

Bob

How many people really rotate the tablet when they're reading?

That is not really the correct way of looking at it. Some people use their iPad exclusively in landscape mode and others exclusively in portrait mode. The correct way to word the question would be "How many people want to have to rotate their iPad to use your app?" I, for one, would only buy an app that is available in landscape mode.

Purchasing a iPad this week, I hope to start exploring what's out there. So far, I've mostly been looking at tutorials and training videos to get a handle on the possibilities.

I think Bob raises some good points about what clients will settle for and also about the labor-intensive nature of the process. We have to start working with the tools and testing iterations on an iPad. Hope the encouragment we're getting on this forum and Lynda tutorials like yours will help us accomplish this.

Derek,

Thanks, but this one seems more oriented in DPS than ePub; with the RovingBird stuff, way too expensive for a small operation. However, using your lead, I found another from the same group. Unfortunately, it takes place in August. We hope to be further along by then. Depending on our progress, may still do it...

Hello, Anne Marie,

I'd watched all your Lynda.com tutorials on InDesign CS5, and recently all the adobe TV and whatever offerings Lynda.com has so far (not much) on InddCS5.5. I think I remember in your CS5 tutorials you saying something about no running heads... Not sure if this is different in CS5.5. I'm assuming that now that I'm ready to do the epub version of a book, which I have laid out for the print version, that I will need to make another version for epub, without any running heads (or page numbers). Am I correct? I'd listen to your entire CS5 tutorial again on Lynda.com, but I know so much was changed for CS5.5 and I don't want to get confused.

I posted this elsewhere, but perhaps this is the place for it, since people here seem to be solving problems left and right!

Steve Werner wrote:

 

I know of one person who has extensively tested placing video and audio in EPUBs for the iPad. It's Elizabeth Castro. She has published a small EPUB about it. You can order it here:

 

http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2011/05/audio-and-video-in-epub-new- straight-to.html

NUts you beet me to it, while I was logging in

Yes Liz Castro is the Guru of ePub

http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2011/05/update-to-audio-and-video-in -epub.html