Threepress Consulting blog

For all your retrospective needs, my ebook year in review and 2010 thoughts.

This is really funny if you get the joke, and still a nice style if you don’t. Thanks Kirk Biglione!

I’ve examined all the listings in the DRM-free publishers index and:

Categorized the publishers, broadly, by genre
Indicated whether their ebooks are available as ePub

Both tasks were surprisingly hard: many of these publishers accept works from a variety of genres, and of course there are multiple distribution channels selling a variety of formats with or without DRM. [...]

Obviously I’m a fan of the ePub format. It’s flexible enough to support advanced publications, but a simple text ebook can be put together with minimal effort.
But I don’t think it’s minimal enough. If I could go back in time and be involved with ePub and its predecessors, here are the choices I’d make:
Make [...]

The ePub format allows for a fairly comprehensive set of book-friendly metadata, mostly drawn from the Dublin Core set of terms. Knowing what metadata to use and how it will appear in today’s and tomorrow’s readers is key; here are some recommendations:
Authorship
Two elements describe authorship of a work: dc:creator and dc:contributor. As you might [...]

The vast majority of ebooks today have print cousins, despite some recent digital-only publishing news. As a consequence, many people creating ePubs want to know how to tie references to the printed pages back into the ebook. My personal opinion is that this sort of print-centrism is unnecessary for the vast majority of titles1, but [...]

This post from August 2008 contains some my thinking at the time about how to make ebook reading and shopping experiences more social. I’m surprised that none of it has happened yet; even the limited lending feature of the B&N Nook doesn’t really capture it:
As soon as I’ve finished the book, the device prompts me [...]

InDesign CS4 is one of the most popular tools for creating ePubs, but the range of options it provides when exporting can confound many users. While I’m not a wizened InDesign expert, I have accumulated a set of choices for the various options that differ from the defaults and can help form the basis of [...]

Languages aren’t just written right-to-left or left-to-right, of course. They can also be written top-to-bottom, as in Chinese. How can you indicate that a block of text should be rendered vertically rather than horizontally?
In ePub, you can’t.
I was surprised to discover that the subset of CSS supported by ePub only includes the rtl or ltr [...]

Languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are written right-to-left (RTL) rather than left-to-right (LTR), as in European languages. When dealing with only one of those scripts at a time, computers generally handle the directionality well by just falling back on the user’s general language setting. But what if you have to render text in multiple [...]