Now in Spanish: De InDesign CS 5.5 a EPUB y Kindle

I've been wanting to offer translated versions of my books for a long time, and today I'm happy to announce that “De InDesign CS 5.5 a EPUB y Kindle”, the translation into Spanish of “From InDesign CS 5.5 to EPUB and Kindle” is now available directly from my website. Like the English version, it comes with EPUB, Kindle/mobi, and PDF DRM-free files. You can also buy it from the Apple iBookstore and shortly on Amazon as well.

It has been a much longer and more difficult process than I thought; one more piece of evidence that even though these new tools let us do everything ourselves, it still takes a long time.

I have a fair bit of practice in this field. I used to run a publishing house in Barcelona and managed the translation of Macintosh-related books into Spanish.

Please note that I don't do the translation myself. Thankfully, my expert cover designer, Andreu Cabré, is also a native of Barcelona.

I'll admit that it's a bit of an experiment. Can this work? The publishing industry says that Spanish-reading ebook customers are all pirates. I don't believe it (and have the sales of my English books to Spain and Latin America to prove it), but I'll let you know. All I can say is, if it does work, I'll translate more books!

And I confess I would really love to translate my books into Catalan as well. Would you buy them if I did? Are there other languages that you'd like to see. Let me know!

Here's the Table of Contents for De InDesign CS 5.5 a EPUB y Kindle:

Tabla de Contenidos

De InDesign a ebook en 10 pasos

Planificar el libro

¿Qué se puede hacer en un ebook?

Cabeceras y texto al pie de página

Números de página

Fuentes

Tamaño de texto

Formateo adicional

Espaciado, saltos de página y viudas

Alineación

Columnas

Capitulares y versalitas

Caracteres extranjeros y demás símbolos

Imágenes

Bordes y colores de fondo

Tabla de contenidos e índice

Separación en sílabas

Enlaces

Tablas

Sonido y vídeo

Crear el libro en InDesign

Crear una plantilla

Guardar una plantilla

La importancia de los estilos

Crear una portada

Generar una portada a partir de la primera página

Imágenes y el orden de exportación

Usar objetos en línea para controlar el orden de exportación

Objetos anclados colocados a medida

Usar artículos para controlar el orden de exportación

Colocar y exportar sonido y vídeo

Crear vínculos

Crear hipervínculos

Crear referencias cruzadas

Crear notas al pie de página

Formatear notas al pie de página

Crear una tabla de contenidos navegable

Generar una tabla de contenidos

Mapear las etiquetas para la exportación

Especificar los metadatos

Exportar a EPUB

Añadir más metadatos

Generar una portada

Ordenar el contenido al exportar

Márgenes, listas y ADE

Opciones para exportar imágenes

Tamaño de imagen y alineación

Formatos de imagen

Navegar el panel Contenido

Las opciones de CSS

Usar un CSS existente

¡A punto para exportar!

Reventar un EPUB

Porqué aún hay que reventar archivos EPUB de InDesign

Problemas nuevos

¿Cómo se revienta un EPUB?

Abrir archivos EPUB en BBEdit

Convertir a Kindle/mobi

Crear EPUBs compatibles con Kindle

Texto normal

Saltos de página

Espaciado

Ceñido de texto

Bordes y color de fondo

Fuentes

Portadas

Tabla de contenidos

Indicar el lugar por donde se abre el libro

Imágenes

Convertir un EPUB para Kindle a Kindle/mobi

Usar fuentes incrustadas en iBooks

Recursos adicionales

Índice

Fixing the layout of a reflowable ebook in iBooks

Now I feel less guilty about looking at iBooks Author.

At the end of my last post, I asked if you could add the code that iBooks Author adds to vertically or horizontally block the layout of a regular flowable book. And it turns out that you can!

This is pretty interesting. Remember that with a regular fixed layout book on Apple, you can't change the font or the font size (or the theme). With flowing books you can. But what about if we created a hybrid: a flowing book that only displays in a single large vertical page (portrait orientation) no matter how you hold the iPad.

The trick is to add the orientation lock code to your com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml file without specifying that the book be fixed layout:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<display_options><platform name="*"><option name="orientation-lock">landscape-only</option></platform></display_options>

Imagine the poetry example that I gave last week. If we use the above code on that book, it only shows in a single vertical page, even when the iPad is held horizontally.



But you can still change the font and font size!

I'm wondering if there are a lot of new features in iBooks 2, revealed in the code in iBooks Author ebooks that we can take advantage of for regular EPUB-compatible books.

More soon!

iBooksAuthor and Fixed Layout

I know, I know, I couldn't resist at least looking at the code :)

I keep hearing people refer to iBooks Author books as Fixed Layout, but from what I've seen, they are anything but: hold the iPad vertically, and you get one format, hold the iPad horizontally, and the layout shifts to fit a landscape view.

Today I prematurely posted, given that information, that iBooks Author does NOT create Fixed Layout. According to Apple's spec, that's technically true. A regular iBooks Author book does not contain the com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml file and as I mentioned, changes depending on how your reader holds the iPad. The curious thing is that the book is paradoxically both Fixed Layout and Flowing: the former when it's held horizontally, the latter when you hold it vertically.

Here's a single book with its different views according to how the iPad is held:



In a vertically oriented book, you can change the font size, but not the font. Note that some images completely disappear in Portrait mode. Not sure if there's a way to insist that they appear, but they are definitely not there.



In a horizontally oriented book, you can't change even the font size.

But iBooks Author has an option in the Inspector palette called “Disable portrait orientation”. If you check that option, you will create a virtual fixed layout book (albeit only in landscape orientation), though again, the com file will only contain this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<display_options><platform name="*"><option name="orientation-lock">landscape-only</option></platform></display_options>

So what's the advantage of using "Disable portrait orientation"? I guess if you don't like the way Apple adjusts the layout for portrait orientation, this would be an easy way to get rid of it, and to create a sort of fixed layout.

What I'm really curious about is if there's a way to force regular flowing books to a certain orientation using this code. Previously, it only worked with Fixed Layout books. Apple is really blurring the lines.

That said, if you've read my earlier posts on iBooks Author, you know that I am very reticent about agreeing to Apple's exclusivity agreement, and so I haven't delved into it very far.

Ten reasons I can't recommend or use iBooks Author

I haven't stopped thinking about iBooks Author since I saw it announced yesterday morning. There are so many pieces to the story that I thought I'd take another stab at explaining them all.

First, a quick recap. Apple yesterday launched a powerful WYSIWYG tool, iBooks Author, that creates electronic textbooks quickly and easily. That's the good news. The bad news is that the End user license for iBooks Author requires that all books created with iBooks Author be sold exclusively through Apple's iBookstore, and the books that iBooks Author (which I'm going to call iBA books) creates are in an Apple proprietary format, based on EPUB3, but distinct from it, and called "ibooks".

Why might that be a problem?

1. Apple has the final say in what can be sold on the iBookstore. Each book must be approved by Apple. If Apple doesn't approve your book, you can't sell it anywhere else.

2. It's not at all clear how far Apple's control of an iBA book's content goes. If you create an ebook in iBooks Author, can you then copy out the content and create a Kindle book in some other tool? What if you create an iBA book from an existing Kindle-published novel? Can Apple require that you remove that book from Amazon?

3. It's not at all clear that Apple's exclusivity benefits kids, schools, or teachers. iPads are expensive, and Apple's exclusivity will mean that schools will be entirely at the mercy of a single company, for its approval of content, pricing and availability of devices, and tools for making textbooks. In the US, content in textbooks is currently controlled by local schoolboards. I don't want to cede that role to Apple.

4. iBA ebooks will work only on iBooks on iPad (I don't think it works even in iPhone/iPod touch). Although Apple had promised support for EPUB in its initial release of iBooks for the original iPad in April, 2010, it has now broken that promise. Apple and Steve Jobs have long wanted to control all the hardware and software so that they were perfectly integrated. One of the first thing Jobs did upon returning to Apple was kill the clones. Now they want control over the content as well.

Currently iBA ebooks will work only in iBooks. Will iBooks stop supporting EPUB created with other tools?

5. It fragments the ebook ecosystem and requires new publishing tools and workflows for publishers. iBooks Author does not create EPUB files and it cannot import existing EPUB files. It certainly can't export to any other format. I don't know any publishers who are looking for extra formats in which to publish their books.

6. Apple's iBookstore currently serves only 32 countries out of the 205 existing countries in the world. Not included? Brazil (nor all of Latin America), Russia, India, Japan, China (nor all of Asia), New Zealand, South Africa (nor all of Africa).

7. Apple iBookstore is not that great. It's hard to find books in the Apple iBookstore, sometimes even if you know the title! There are few recommendations, few reviews. And there are hardly any books, especially outside the US. Sure Apple wants to compel people to put books into the iBookstore, but is it in our best interest?


8. It's bossy. I bridle at anyone telling me where I can sell my books. Even if I only wanted to sell through the iBookstore I would be annoyed at Apple making me sign a paper to that effect.

9. It's unnecessary. Even if iBooks Author generated EPUB standard supporting ebooks, there's not an ereader in existence that could have viewed them. They would have blown the competition out of the water, without any coercion required.

10. Books are special. This is about books (for teaching our children!) which in my opinion should not be controlled by any company or government. What I have loved about the web and ebooks is that anyone can create and publish them without anyone else's approval. Books are information, are democracy, are freedom. No one has a right to control them.

Before you go off to the comments to tell me how I have a choice and I can just not use iBooks Author, stop yourself. I know I have that choice. I also don't need to hear about how iBooks Author is a free program and I should therefore not have any opinion on what it can or cannot require. Besides the fact that free is a relative term here (given Apple's 30% take for starters), I'm not talking about what is legal but what I think would have been right, what would have been smart, what would have really had a transformative affect on publishing, technology, and education. Apple could have done so much better. I was rooting for Apple, and they took the low road.

iBooks Author is beautiful but you can only use it to sell through Apple iBookstore

The license agreement to Apple's new iBooks Author tool for creating electronic textbooks has a very peculiar clause:

If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

I find that clause unacceptable and ridiculous. If I create a book, I want to be able to sell it anywhere I want, not only through Apple. I no more want to restrict my sales to their store than I want to restrict them on Amazon or anywhere else.

Frankly, I even find it insulting.

You can find the full license agreement by going to the iBooks Author menu, choose About iBooks Author, and then click License Agreement in the About box that appears.

Note that it didn't have to be this way. The files that iBooks Author creates are pretty reasonable EPUB files (masked with the .ibooks extension) and can be read in NOOK and other EPUB readers. You can unzip them and see the EPUB files inside.

I am very disappointed.