There is an e-book rush out there. Simon & Schuster, whose e-book sales quadrupled last year, is adding 5,000 titles to its list, while Random House, recording a 400% year-on-year increase in e-book sales, is doubling its offerings to 15,000 titles. And no wonder—the Association of American Publishers reported that total e-book sales ending September 2008 surged 51% over the same period in 2007.
For now, e-books are mostly “fiction and nonfiction trade titles, along with city and regional travel guides. Currently, about 60% of our e-book projects come from trade publishers,” said Jan Palmen, senior v-p of publishing practice at Innodata Isogen. His team is converting more than 100,000 titles—averaging 250 pages each at varying complexity levels—for a leading e-book device manufacturer.
As for challenges in e-book projects, Palmen said, “Identifying the right titles as candidates for conversion is important. We have to make sure publishers understand that print layout—which is fixed—and e-book layout are different and often not comparable. This is because e-book text flows freely and its layout depends on the screen and font size chosen by the reader. Another challenge, but less so over time, is in making sure publishers have the digital rights from the original authors. Books published 15 or 20 years ago specified only reprint rights because digital or electronic distribution rights simply didn't exist at that time.”
It is crucial for publishers to stop viewing e-publishing and print publishing as distinct entities, advised Palmen. “Too often, publishers create new content for print first and then think about how to get it ready for e-publishing, which includes e-books. They need to view all content as assets that can have multiple outputs, revisit their content supply chain and reorganize their operations to combine print and e-publishing. This mindset shift would help them realize tremendous efficiencies and cost savings.” Thus, having the content in XML and doing simultaneous conversion to multiple e-book formats would be a cheaper and faster option.
“The publishing industry, led by AAP, has endorsed ePub as the de facto e-book standard. This important step places the burden of converting titles to proprietary formats on the e-book device manufacturers. At the same time, ePub is a suitable starting point for conversion to other formats,” added Palmen, whose team has developed proprietary conversion tools that use iXML as the intermediate file format. “We have helped publishers convert books to a range of formats, including Kindle, Sony eReader, Palm and MobiPocket.”
At Cepha Imaging in Bangalore, India, director Hymanand Angara and his team recently converted a 1,250-page, full-color medical book with 135 pieces of art and 146 tables. “Converting the content into low-resolution files without affecting readability was the main challenge,” said Angara, whose team completed 120 e-book projects in the past year, two-thirds of which came from American publishers. “We converted the complex tables, with rows in different colors and shades, into images. In projects replete with formulas, figures or tables such as this, joint evaluation and decision making with the client at the initial production stages is crucial. A decision has to be made whether to convert the figures or tables into images. Having too many images will increase the file size, thus slowing down e-book navigation. At times, it may be better to have e-book PDFs rather than device-compatible ePub files.”
Cross-linking references may also be time-consuming, especially when the source files were generated through a non-XML process. “On the other hand, conversion of simple, straight text content is nearly a 'one-click' process. We can convert the entire book to e-book files that are automatically formatted according to the corresponding style sheet,” added Angara.
At Cepha, where the Palm and MobiPocket formats dominate, Kindle has made its appearance, too. “We also support other formats that are requested by our clients. Our team has developed proprietary conversion tools that automate much, if not all, of the conversion process from various source file formats. Furthermore, we have developed scripts to export files directly to XML, aggregate them and then convert them to e-book files.”
Clearly, there is more to e-books than static pages. As Palmen explained, “Publishers need to embrace the full multimedia potential of e-books by incorporating audio, video and other online media into the e-book experience. When that happens, e-books will really take off.”
This is part of a regular series highlighting content/publishing services provided by companies in India.
