Book production
Papering over e-books

A new publisher finds printing is far easier than making a quality e-book

Science and technology
Babbage

ONE might easily think that print publishing is a fussy business: all of that preparation to put ink on paper seems rather last century—or last half millennium. Electronic books have been hailed as the future and the perfection of the codex format, because of their ease of production, distribution, and infinite perfect replication.

Yet this Babbage has found that not to be the case, even though he has worked with e-books for decades across many formats. Your correspondent also has printer's ink in his veins: he trained as one of the last dedicated typesetters, worked in a printing plant in his 20s, and designed and produced dozens of books in the 1980s and 1990s. But even he was unprepared for how easy it has become to print a book and how difficult it remains to produce an electronic version suitable for a range of e-readers, including the Kindle.

As the result of a Kickstarter campaign, Babbage hired designers he knew and a recommended printer, and contracted to have made 1,500 copies of a 216-page book with a clothbound hardcover and dust jacket. While the process took longer than he'd hoped and expected due to his own bandwidth limitations, once the digital files went into the printing firm's operations, there was little to do but wait as a series of specialists carried out successive tasks at the printing plant. The final result exceeded his expectations, and as the project's backers have received the tome, delighted e-mails and tweets abound.

However, once the layout files had headed to far Wisconsin (Babbage is in Seattle; his designers in Maine), your correspondent turned to what he deemed to be the easier task of converting the layout file first to a hyperlinked PDF document, and then to the EPUB format used in most e-book hardware and software, and to MOBI, Amazon's proprietary and simplified analogue of EPUB. (Individual e-readers may wrap EPUB with encryption for digital rights management, DRM for short, to prevent use on competing devices or outside of a specific purchaser's account.)

Amazon's Kindle predated wide use of EPUB, and MOBI was its homegrown solution. More than two years ago, Amazon muddied the waters by adopting the newest form of EPUB, version 3, but applying its own secret sauce and labelling it KF8. A proper MOBI file now encapsulates the older MOBI format and KF8 in a single document, so that it works on the original readers and to the best advantage on newer readers that support the fancier layout.

However, Amazon requires the use of its tools to take an EPUB and convert it into a MOBI suitable for distribution to readers ready to load directly onto Kindles or Kindle apps. The converted file may also be offered for sale through its store. To reach all e-readers the goal is to hone an EPUB.

The PDF proved simple, requiring a few hours of fussing to get the right combination of metadata and image compression to produce a reasonably sized file (measured in megabytes) that also retained image fidelity. It also featured a clickable table of contents and other paraphernalia.

But PDFs are offshoots of the printing process. Designed as an exact digital replica of the layout created in a program like Adobe InDesign, which was employed, the point is to display precisely the same everywhere, as if one were looking at a printed page. This includes rendering the type crisply from vector (line- and curve-based) outlines at any size, large and small.

EPUB, in contrast, unbinds the notion of an exact replica. It has a single dimension it worries about, rather than the two dimensions of PDF. An EPUB preserves the flow of text from start to finish, and incorporates images (and, in later versions, audio and video) at noted points within that flow. Everything else is up for grabs.

Depending on a reader's hardware or software, he may change the typeface or its size, the margins of a page, a paragraph's justification (ragged at the edge of the right column or fully square against it) and other elements. Fonts embedded in the EPUB may be honoured on some devices and in some apps, or ignored or overridden by the reader. In short, EPUB and its ilk serve all masters.

And that is where the trouble began. Accustomed to creating InDesign layouts for which the ultimate destination is either print or PDF, Babbage and his designers (under his direction; the e-buck stops with him) made myriad tiny choices that refined the presentation, but which made EPUB conversion tedious. Choices as simple as the width of a text container for a headline, repeated 28 times throughout the book, once per story, affected the flow of text that InDesign created. The opening spreads with overlays of photographs, illustrations and type work in a PDF, but had to be deconstructed and rendered into flat image files for EPUB.

Your correspondent hired a friend, an early employee at Voyager and one of the people who, in the 1980s, set the standards for "enhanced" books that have developed to the current day, to do the lion's share of the conversion. Despite having produced dozens of e-books in EPUB and other formats, the colleague had worked mostly with a firm that derived its workflow from Apple's Pages ’09 page-layout and word-processing software.

As we worked through the underbrush of our own making, and cut a clear path from the source file form which the print book and PDF were made to export an EPUB, we faced a "fork" in the road. Should we create an almost-done EPUB from InDesign and then twiddle it further? Doing so would break the chain, and require any typos or other fixes to the source document to be made separately in the EPUB file, which increased the chance of other errors. In the end, InDesign proved malleable enough. (Pedants may tut-tut your correspondent, and note there are many paths to an EPUB. Yet, having consulted with many experts, they all have their own zigs and zags.)

As toil proceeded intermittently on the EPUB across a period of three weeks of frustration and revision, the printer rendered our files into billions of dots and sent page and colour proofs; produced printing plates and slapped ink on tens of thousands of sheets of paper; folded, sewed, cut and bound editions; debossed a cloth cover and pushed white foil into some of it; packed up boxes and piled pallets; and shipped over a tonne of books to four warehouses, whence 1,200 books were wrapped individually and sent on their way to backers. (Attentive readers will note 300 remain for sale.)

While hundreds (or thousands, counting warehouse and postal workers) were involved in nearly perfect production and distribution of these hardcover books, Babbage hardly broke a sweat. The production of a book has changed drastically in all the particulars of how words and images move from the mind through intermediaries onto a page. But in the larger scheme, a printed book remains an object of the 1500s, with all the advantages of a process perfected across the centuries. E-books will get there. Just not today.

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