Thu 14 January 2016 at 10.00 am

eBook Design and Production

for Publishers, Editors, Typesetters and Freelance designers or anyone familiar with InDesign.

Chris Jennings

Taking Place: Oxford Brookes University, Publishing IT Suite

Introduction

This short 1 day (10am to 4.30pm) course is intended for anyone who is familiar with book design for print but need to understand the implications when eBooks are required.

Location and Facilities

The course will take place in the Publishing IT suite in the Tonge Building at Oxford Brookes University (Gypsy Lane Campus). The room is equipped with 42 iMacs and lecturer projection. The MACs have all the latest software including Adobe Creative Cloud (InDesign, InCopy, Photoshop etc), HTML editors, scripts for ePubs and multimedia editing tools. Google drive is installed so that delegates can save work to be retrieved at a later stage.

Skills Level Expected

Experience of InDesign or other page layout software would be useful but not essential.

Course Objectives

After attending this short course, delegates will:

  • appreciate the workflow options including web first and XML
  • understand the choices available to publishers when publishing content to multiple platforms
  • become familiar with the available technologies to deliver eBooks
  • understand the different formats of eBooks and how to create them
  • be able to use page layout software with an awareness of output options

Price for the course: £160

Proposed Schedule for the Day

Before Arrival

Course Delegates should source at least 2 cookery recipes and pictures to go with them. Signed up delegates will have access to a Content Management system to be able to post the recipes and pictures. These recipes will then be available during the course as sample content to be exported as XML and further used to build the eBook.

At Brookes

Welcome and Logging in to the MACs

Presentation: Publisher’s Choices, Devices and platforms, eBook formats

Hands on Web First Editing

  • Exporting XML and images from CMS
  • Understanding XML

Hands on InDesign

  • Building a template and style mapping
  • Styles and Object tagging

Presentation: Detailed look at the ePUB format with an introduction to HTML5 and CSS

Hands on InDesign

  • Table of Contents
  • Cover Image
  • Metadata
  • Image Captions
  • Exporting to ePub reflowable
  • Page Breaks

eBook Review

  • Page breaks
  • Validation
  • Unpacking
  • Editing CSS

Presentation: Fixed Layout eBooks

Hands on InDesign

  • exporting to Fixed layout

eBook Review

  • further investigations of the fixed layout eBook
  • adding a basic index
  • footnotes
  • conversion to Kindle format

Presentation: A general recap and look at alternative formats