"Electronic
Books and ePublishing: A Practical Guide for Authors"
Review by
Erica Ueland
Harold Henke
Springer-Verlag, 2001 221 pages
Perhaps the great global novel you wrote back in the nineties has been asleep on the shelf, and you are ready to dust it off and publish it online. Or your latest work assignment is to publish your company's knowledge materials on the Web.
Whatever your situation, transitioning from the world of print media to a published ebook can be a daunting task. Electronic Books and ePublishing, by Harold Henke, grinds down the mystique surrounding publishing books and manuals online and helps you get a jumpstart in this burgeoning field.
As one reader wrote Henke about her dilemna: "By now, even if you are convinced that ebooks represent the future of publishing, you may well be wondering how you can catch up. The dizzying profusion of epublishing sites only confuses the issue. Meanwhile, the merry-go-round is gaining speed. How does one get aboard?"
Henke explains the role that various support organizations play as resources for a budding epublisher. To name a few:
Association of American Publishers (AAP). This organization for the online publishing trade has produced work on digital rights management, metadata, and developing standards for the industry. www.bookpublishers.org
EDItEUR. The main activity of the "EDItEUR" is to provide a dictionary of metadata and international standards for epublishing. This organization has published the standard for ecommerce book products. www.editeur.org
Library of Congress. A key player in the conversion of print media to electronic format, the Library of Congress addresses copyright issues for documents and books. www.lcweb.loc.gov
The vast majority of ebooks are created with Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word. Henke clearly presents the advantages of these applications. Acrobat, when used with Adobe FrameMaker or Microsoft Word, makes it possible for ewriters to publish ebooks with hypertext links. Whether Acrobat is used with FrameMaker or with the plugin called "PDFMaker" for documents composed in Word, a number of positive features prevail.
If you have published or seen ebooks with Acrobat Reader, you may have noticed how headings are bookmarked and can be used as a table of contents. Index entries or illustration, figure, or table titles in lists become hot links. An especially useful feature is the conversion of page numbers into hyperlinks within tables of contents or indices. The capabililty of the ebook to resize so that the page fits the screen is another plus from Adobe.
If you opt to use the Microsoft Reader plugin for Word, you will see how easy it is to install it with Word for Windows 2000 on the Windows 98, NT, and 2000 operating systems. After you install it, the free Reader plugin shows its icon on the Word toolbar. Presto! Select the icon, and you can create an ebook without much trouble at all in Microsoft's format.
No matter which application you choose, studies have shown that you are better off following a classic structure. In the transition from print media to epublishing, the design of ebooks should resemble normal features from print publications as much as possible. In usability tests, readers have preferred a similarity to print books when they read ebooks. Using age-old devices (e.g., tables of contents, appendices, and indices) in a familiar way enables smooth navigation and, of course, less work.
Depending on the needs of the people who navigate your document, you may need to publish both a print and electronic version. Because of the growing demand for each, both print media and ebooks are going to exist side by side for a long, long time.
