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Buzz - E-Publishing: The Inside Story We are hearing more each day how the face, or typeface, of publishing is falling into a vat of ones-and-zeros. As the art of writing gets hit by the stun-gun of technology, the shear volume of information is staggering. This article is intended to tap you lightly and watch you fall. If we are talking tech, we need some numbers. U.S. e-book sales tripled between February 2010 and the beginning of 2011 to hit $90 million, while sales of printed books fell by 25 percent during the same period, according to the Association of American Publishers. Forrester Research estimates that annual e-book sales could reach $2.8 billion by 2015. Most of today's e-book purchases are works from major publishers—digital versions of print best sellers, but the door is also open for lesser known authors as well. That's us. Here's another stunning fact: Barry Eisler, best-selling author, made headlines in March when he turned down a $500,000 advance from a mainstream publisher to self-publish an e-book instead. At the same time, 26-year-old novice writer Amanda Hocking, who writes young-adult fiction about vampires and other supernatural beings landed a $2 million contract with St. Martin's Press after selling more than a million e-books. E-books grease skids going both ways. So enough already, we get it. E-books are a publishing beast we need to domesticate and have in our own home. But what is it exactly? We hear the various readers of said e-books are all different, run on proprietary software. How do we get a grip on a whole herd of technology? I'll tell you. Software and protocols that tame hardware for domestic use have committees that try to come up with a package of standards that manufactures of computerized equipment, including all these little mobile devices, have not been asleep when it come to digitizing books. The world has a standard called ePub format to work from now. Where the fork in road comes is very similar to what goes on with browsers like Safari, FireFox, IE, Chrome, Oparah, etc., because they interpret the HTML standards in slightly different ways, so it is with these e-book readers. Each reader does things a little different with the standard. But the thing to latch on to is they all use the ePub format standard as a basis. Okay then, if we can get a look under the hood of ePub we, as writers, can at least see how many teeth this beast has to avoid a nasty bite. There is some good news here. The inside story reveals a trick. The ePub standard makers used a well know file manipulation app called Zip that groups a set of files into an archive. Therefore, an e-book disguised with the .epub extension is really a zip-archive. It has file compression built in and the simplicity of being a well know technology makes it universally acceptable. The thing is when you see an e-book file with other extensions like .mobi, its basically derived from the ePub standard. If you change that file extension to .zip and use WinZip to open it—you get a small group of files and folders that are all editable in a text editor. No fancy formats or proprietary jazz (see ePub diagram below). If your a techie, this amounts to the MIME type for an e-books of epub/zip. They are one in the same. What happens is the breeding stock is epub. A .mobi or .azw type for Kindle or Sony's .lrf or Barnes&Noble that uses straight .epub adjusts these internal files to match the hardware/software that uses them. The cool thing is these adjustments are rather slight. I'm not suggesting you go to the trouble to learn all this and become a epub mechanic, not yet anyway. If you like to know how things tick, you may get hooked though. Click here to see ePub diagram Click on this: next column |
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There are some basic things that any author can do to make a bulletproof epub file of their bookcopy that will upload to Kindle, for example, that will not only make the file acceptable without rejection, but help you understand how to layout your bookcopy to look the best it can on these little readers or in the case of the iPad, almost back to the size of a lap-top. The next trend will probably be devices that fold out to be the size of a desktop screen. And we come full circle. What are these files inside the epub Trojan Horse? Each chapter is a separate little HTML page. Yep, laid out just like a webpage with HTML and style sheets. Then there are files that organize the book for the reader. A TOC is there to fill in the sidebar in these readers and the cover is a separate image file. But one really important factor that any author should be interested in is making sure the metadata file is correct. What's metadata? This is the descriptive information about the book itself like author, publisher, date created, date published, who has the copyright, key words to search for the book, and a nice story description. All good stuff that ends up being used by the reader if it's filled in. If you don't know about this, and don't edit the metadata to include it, nothing shows up in the reader and the search by those looking for your story go unaided. Yes, this is nice to get right. If you've tried to upload you own book to Kindle, for instance, you notice they ask you for all this stuff in various boxes as you go along. Well, guess what the conversion program is going to do with that information? It sticks it in the metadata file for you, but it's limited. You can have a lot more info there if you edit it yourself. So that's ePub 101. What do you do now that I panicked your basic sense of marketing? Who ever creates the ePub version of your book for you, make sure they get this metadata stuff right. No slight of hand and you end up short on things you want associated with your book. You can take classes to learn how to garage mechanic the whole thing yourself. Lynda.com has a whole course on just what I've been talking about that's excellent. The important thing to know is all these readers use the ePub standard and are all very similar in operation, so the look on the tiny screen is a function of how well these little HTML pages are built. So like a good website builder, you now need a epub page wizard to build these little pages using all kinds of styling tricks. Like websites, it's all in the style sheet as to how it will look. If you wondered why these conversion are so tedious to get through Amazon or Apple or Barnes&Noble, etc. when you try to upload a Word bookfile, you now know it's apples and oranges. Word is a gummy formatted monster, way, way far away from a HTML webpage. It's like being given a Conestoga Wagon and trying to made a jet airliner out of it. But, if you start with your bookcopy as a ePub document, things are much easier. In fact, you can learn to adjust the styles yourself. Okay, maybe that's going too far, but you going to have to be able to understand what's going on to make sure the dude that does lay out your file is doing it with style. You live in an electronic age.
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