Developing an Ebook Production Workflow
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DEVELOPING AN EBOOK PRODUCTION WORKFLOW: CHALLENGES AND LEARNING AT TALONBOOKS by Chloë Jasmin Filson B.A. (Hons., English Literature), Trent University, 2007 Project Report Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Publishing in the Publishing Program Faculty of Communication, Art, and Technology © Chloë Filson 2013 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Fall 2013 All rights reserved. However, in accordance with the Copyright Act of Canada, this work may be reproduced, without authorization, under the conditions for “Fair Dealing.” Therefore, limited re-production of this work for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, review, and news reporting is likely to be in accordance with the law, particularly if cited appropriately. • i • Approval name: Chloë Filson degree: Master of Publishing title of project: Developing an Ebook Production Workflow: Challenges and Learning at Talonbooks supervisory committee: Rowland Lorimer Senior Supervisor Director and Professor Publishing Program Mary Schendlinger Senior Lecturer Publishing Program Ann-Marie Metten Industry Supervisor Editor Talonbooks Vancouver, British Columbia date approved: • ii • Partial Copyright Licence Partial Copyright Licence iii • iii • Abstract Talonbooks, a Canadian literary publisher established in 1967, initiated ebook production in 2012 and began to develop a feasible workflow. Talonbooks first attempted to produce universally functional “reflowable” ebooks intended for consumption on any of many popular devices. Different but similarly popular formats necessitated the emergence of a two-pronged approach: epub files were produced, duplicated, optimized for Kindle devices, and converted to Mobipocket. This workflow was still in use at Talonbooks as of December 2013. As Talonbooks tackles the electronic (re)production of its sizeable backlist, and as technology and the economics of book publishing change, the workflow will be developed further. The latter half of this report identifies challenges and opportunities – improving metadata; establishing indexing practices; experimenting with emerging digital- publishing platforms/tools; and employing outside contractors selectively in order to complete backlist ebook conversion – and analyzes them within the context of digital book publishing as it was from approximately 2009 to 2013. Keywords: Ebooks; Ebook production; epub; Conversion; Workflow; Talonbooks Subject Terms: Electronic Books; Electronic Publishing; Standardization • iv • Acknowledgements Many thanks to Kevin Williams, Vicki Williams, and Greg Gibson at Talonbooks for sharing their expertise and welcoming me into the fold. Especial thanks to Ann-Marie Metten and Les Smith for their ongoing mentorship. Thanks, also, to Rowland Lorimer, whose clear-sighted suggestions provided much needed direction and food for thought, to Mary Schendlinger for her steadfastness and attentiveness, and to Heather Lohnes for her generosity. Finally, heartfelt thanks to my husband, Robin Wilson, for his tireless support and encouragement, and to my family – in particular, my father, B. K. Filson: sounding board, early reader of this report, and first publisher in the family. “The publication of high thoughts is the dynamic power in the arteries of life; it is the very soul of the world.” – ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, 1875 • v • Table of Contents page contents ii Approval iii Partial Copyright Licence iv Abstract v Acknowledgements vi Table of Contents vii List of Figures and Tables 1 1. Introduction 1 1 1.1 Ebook Production: More Awkward than “Agile” 5 1.2 Talonbooks and Its Ebook-Publishing Strategy 8 2. Talon’s Workflow 9 2.1 Iteration 1: Learning the Ropes 11 2.2 Iteration 2: In the Swing of Things 12 2.2.A The Kindle-Optimization Process 16 2.3 Summary of Workflow Developed 18 3. Some Current Challenges and Recommendations 20 3.1 Improving Talon’s Positioning within the “Long Tail” through Better Metadata 23 3.2 Indexing Electronic Books 26 3.3 Experimenting with Ebook Layout 28 3.4 Selective Outsourcing to Serve the Digital Marketplace 32 4. Conclusions 35 References 38 Appendix: Talonbooks Ebook Proofreading Checklist • vi • List of Figures and Tables page figure name of figure 12 Table 1 Key differences between “universal” and Kindle-optimized epub files 13 Figure 1 Additions to and revisions of the Talonbooks Proofreading Checklist 17 Figure 2 Ebook production workflow employed at Talonbooks, June–September 2012 • vii • 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Ebook Production: More Awkward than “Agile” The context in which books are read has changed dramatically in recent years. Reading onscreen has become increasingly popular, as evidenced by a jump in the sales of ereading devices (including multi-function tablets and smartphones)1 and the rapid disappearance of brick-and-mortar bookstores (as Erin Williams discussed in her Master of Publishing project report, “The Chapters Effect on British Columbia-Based Literary Publishers”). Even the definition of “book” is in question.2 Unsurprisingly, this has affected the nature and context of book pub- lishing and production, as publishers attempt to meet demand and stay abreast of changing technologies. One pragmatic effect is that publishers have had to produce large numbers of electronic publications (or ebooks) quickly, in order to access new revenue streams and the emerging market for backlist titles. Ebook production (or e-production) has been fraught with difficulties: software inefficiencies, apparent incompatibility with established print-production procedures, backward-compatibility issues, and the general slowness of humans and organizations to change (no matter how well-intentioned they may be). As such, book production workflows in general do not yet efficiently accommo- date e-production. The following summary, written by Alison Knight in 2007 (at the dawn of the current wave of digital publishing), is still relevant in 2013: In the late 1990s, the ebook was widely expected to revolutionize publishing. With its promise of immediate availability, low costs, and state-of-the-art features, industry analysts … predicted the development of a multibillion dollar ebook market by 2005. Yet the reality for most publishers of ebooks has been one of confused production and low revenues. The reasons behind this state of the ebook market are manifold … lack of reader willingness to abandon print, and widely divergent file format requirements on 1 According to a study conducted by the International Data Corporation in March 2011, sales for all ebook readers worldwide more than doubled between the third and fourth quarters of 2010, rising to 12.8 million units shipped. Of these, 48 percent were Kindle models. (IDC) 2 For the purposes of this report, “book” refers to a composition, primarily of text, that is published or intended for publication as a complete, stand-alone work. • 1 • the part of distributors and readers combine to produce a market defined by inflated disorder and wary indifference. (1) These difficulties have been addressed to some degree over the past decade but still persist. Standards of quality are still being established, and best practices are difficult to discern. Another significant challenge arises from the fact that book publishers generally wish to sell electronic versions of both frontlist (new) and backlist (old) titles, for all represent potential sources of revenue. The prospect of producing electronic versions of backlist titles is a daunting one, especially to publishers that have sizeable backlists. The production files used to reprint backlist titles are in many cases archived or housed in formats that are inconvenient or difficult to retrofit (Portable Document Format [pdf], old page-layout files, and sometimes, in the case of books published in the 1980s and earlier, only as film separations or printed copies). In many cases, digitization (the conversion of printed works to any digital formats) – itself a time-consuming process – must take place before ebook produc- tion can begin. Talonbooks is a mid-sized publishing company by Canadian standards, with six full-time employees and a handful of part-time employees, regularly employed freelancers, and occasional paid interns. Small and mid-sized book-publishing companies like Talonbooks are in a particularly difficult position; even those that want to produce ebooks are not necessarily prepared to do so. Expertise is not widespread; building ebooks requires working knowledge of xhtml (exten- sible HypertText Markup Language) and css (Cascading Style Sheets), and many companies do not have suitably skilled staff members. Even large publishers do not typically have, in-house, the specialized knowledge required to fix errors in epub3 files (Sandusky, Secrets), though they may be more able to hire dedicated ebook- production staff than small and mid-sized publishers. Nor do small publishers have the tools. There is no industry-wide agreement about what software to use when making ebooks (though Adobe InDesign is a common starting point), in part because few software programs have been built for this purpose. Plenty of common tools and documentation are available to web and app developers, “but there are 3 epub is the most widely supported ebook format. Its nature will be discussed in various sections of this report. (Note that the International Digital Publishing Forum spells and capitalizes this word as “epub,” but many variants are in use; this report conforms to the idpf standard but permits variants found in product names or quoted