Sunday, March 09, 2014

Editing: the missing part of EPUBs


An editor surrounded by devices and books, trying to make sense of it all

Editing: the missing part of EPUBs

by John Pettigrew

Many publishers omit a crucial step when they make EPUBs and so are damaging their business through ignorance. Selling EPUBs that are riddled with errors tells your customers and authors that you don’t care. So how do we get our EPUBs right?
The whole publishing industry seems to be obsessed by EPUBs because it is powering the rise of ebooks – which in some genres now exceeds 70% of the total books bought. (Amazon uses their own Kindle format, but everything below applies equally to Kindle files.)
Customers like ebooks because they are flexible and convenient, letting people read on ereaders, tablets, laptops or phones. And, in many types of publishing, they’re effectively identical to the print content but cheaper.

Here, though, we hit a problem. Publishers invest heavily in ensuring that their print books are of appropriate quality, but most have invested rather less in their ebooks – even to the extent of not including editors in the process of checking and approving EPUBs files before they’re sold.
This wrong-headed error is, I think, rooted in the idea that converting an InDesign file to an EPUB is ‘just’ a format change and therefore trivial. But this is a big mistake, and one that is causing material damage to the publishing industry on a daily basis as readers and authors alike get the impression that publishers simply aren’t doing a good job – so why should customers come to us, or authors publish with us?

If you’re a publisher who is checking their EPUBs, please read on and share your experiences. For the rest of us, here are some thoughts about how to make things better.

More at Collate it.

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