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After a lot of hours spent watching InDesign how to videos, and struggling to get an epub to look right on the computer monitor I actually made a lot of progress only to find that what adobe showed as the output didn't look anything like what appeared on my ipads, either the old one or the retina screen version. Seems that epubs are really for text type books, not image intensive publications.
Someone sugg. checking with David DuChemin and Craft and Vision ebooks. Turns out they are all pdf's. I checked with a few other sources - pdf's - beginning to tell me something here.
So, I'm not abandoning my intentions to produce an ebook, but I will be doing it in PDF format. Downside is that you need a different version for each screen, but that wasn't all that diff. from epub anyway so not much of a loss, and I can show images properly on screen.
I have the latest edit back from Blurb for my 12X12 book - actually very nice, but at $137 it's incredibly expensive. I'm going to explore more reasonable options.
Anyway, look for a pdf format ebook suitable for the ipad in the not distant future.
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Hi George,
Ouch!
I didn’t know you didn’t realize the difference in epub/pdf on screen. I purchased your books through Oreilly directly, and they give you the option of pdf or epub (or both). Epub definitely mangels the layout, and I just couldn’t read the epub version on my iPhone--or on iBooks (iMac). So I switched to PDF--and that’s why I enjoy C&V ebooks.
I like the pdf format, as it retains the layout authors/photographers intended, when laying out the book. Can I assume your ebook in pdf format will be fine on a desktop, as it will be on the iPad? Please test out, as I don’t own an iPad :-)
The other thing I struggle with is Apple’s implementation of reading the PDF. I just haven’t figured out how to make sure the even numbered pages are on the left, and odd on the right (just like real books) all the time. So that when an author desires a full-spread (2 pages), the full-spread shows. Some ebooks (including yours), shows only half the spread--with the other half on the other side of the next full-spread, when viewing pdfs with 2-pages. Either I haven’t found the pdf option to make this so, or maybe that’s why many C&V ebooks have PDF pages as being a full spread, even though the content may not always require it. For example, if one page is normally 8.5x11, their pdf page would be sized 17x11. So it wouldn’t matter if the page was left, or right. Might want to look into this later option for your ebook.
Wei
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