Digital Editions

Adobe Expanding Investment in Digital Publishing

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:22:45 -0800

As part of a restructuring announced yesterday, Adobe has made the decision to expand its investment in digital publishing, creating a new organization focused on delivering products to increase digital revenue opportunities for book, newspaper and magazine publishers. This organization will combine the efforts of Adobe's eBook business responsible for the Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions, and PDF and EPUB authoring support in Adobe InDesign with Adobe's digital newspaper and magazine efforts responsible for, among other products, the collaboration with the New York Times to create the AIR-based Times Reader 2.0.

The decision to increase investment in this area underscores the importance that Adobe has always given to digital publishing as well as the bright future it sees in helping publishers to deliver compelling digital publications that support a variety of business models: subscription, advertising, retail and other emerging models. We are particularly excited about what we have in store for 2010. We plan to further our reach to emerging mobile reading platforms to allow readers to read anywhere, on any device. With Adobe's acquisition of Omniture, we will help publishers measure and understand how their readership interacts with and uses their content. But, most of all, we will continue to deliver products that make digital books, newspapers and magazines a terrific experience for readers.

We look forward to working with our existing customers and business partners and welcome any new inquiries as we continue our progress in digital publishing.

InDesign to Kindle conversion guide

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:47:09 -0800

Today, we're posting a how-to guide that explains how to convert eBooks authored using Adobe InDesign for compatibility with the Amazon Kindle and the Kindle Store. Because Amazon uses their proprietary AZW format, the Kindle doesn't natively support the open EPUB standard. However, with a bit of open source software, it's fairly easy to convert the EPUB files exported with InDesign into the Amazon-compatible MOBI format.

Converting InDesign documents for Kindle compatibility requires the following steps:

1. Export InDesign document to EPUB
2. Convert EPUB to Amazon-compatible MOBI format
3. Preview on Kindle device (optional)
4. Upload to Amazon store

For complete details, check out the Adobe InDesign to Amazon Kindle Store white paper

EPUB generation library written in Java

Mon, 11 May 2009 14:39:17 -0800

It's come to my attention that I didn't really give EPUBGen a proper introduction, and so there's been some confusion about the project.

EPUBGen project

EPUBGen is a Java library that demonstrates EPUB generation from a variety of document formats, and which may be a useful starting point or reference code for other EPUB generation needs. That is to say, it's an effort to promote the development of a variety of tools and workflows.

Font obfuscation code, available for review

Mon, 11 May 2009 12:54:07 -0800

I realize this blog might have a diverse readership so I'll warn those of you who aren't developers, that this particular blog post probably isn't for you. Unless you find reading Java code interesting, you can probably skip this article. I've implemented the IDPF font obfuscation algorithm which is recommended here. The font obfuscation code can be found in the EPUBGen project, and so you can take and review, and use the code. In this article, I'm going to highlight just the portions of that project that are related to embedding and obfuscating the font information. (The project also has font subsetting and other features which I will not cover.)

InDesign 6.0.2 and EPUB export

Fri, 08 May 2009 15:53:30 -0800

There's a new update to InDesign CS4. Version 6.0.2. The update fixes lots of other stuff, so you may want to look at the release notes to see what's fixed that is not related to the EPUB export, I'm only going to talk about the EPUB plug-in.

RTF, Word, and FB2 file conversion

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:00:38 -0800

EPUBGen is a project that Peter Sorotokin has started, it's a conversion utility for rtf files, word files, and FictionBook files. The output in each case is, of course, epub.

The project is open source, and available for download.

Note that there is also a .jar file for rtf2epub and it should work, but the main intent of this project is to provide source code and examples of the way things could be done. In other words, there's plenty of room for developers to improve and enhance the conversion.

The project includes code to convert a couple different formats to ePub, including generating all the required files and creating the package. The project also shows how to mangle embedded fonts, how to sub-set those font (thus reducing the size of the ePub).

Working with the cover

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:08:21 -0800

The covers on your books make a first impression. So when you're creating a cover for a book you're likely to put in some extra effort to make sure it looks good. When you're working with EPUBs and Adobe Digital Editions, there are some simple things that you can do that have a big impact on the look of the covers.

Options for creating the package file on a Mac

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:56:07 -0800

So, when I need to create an epub by hand, I'll put everything I need in a folder, and then use the Terminal & zip it up by hand. Like so:

Navigate to the folder.
```
zip -Xr9D book.epub mimetype *
```

Ok, so I realize not every one is comfortable working at the command line. That's where MakePackage.scpt comes in. It's an Applescript script that will take a folder and turn it into an EPUB. It expects the folder to be the same layout as the EPUB should be. So, just as if you had renamed a file to .zip and then extracted the contents. Anyway, it's here if you find it useful, if not, there's always the command line.

InDesign Secrets

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:17:07 -0800

Seems InDesignSecrets.com is starting to cover EPUB and InDesign. Awesome. Seems there's a real need for EPUB information for designers, publishers, and authors. Maybe this will help fill that need.

Digital Editions 1.7 Released!

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 13:42:23 -0800

We've released Digital Editions 1.7:

Adobe has updated its popular Digital Editions software, a lightweight, rich Internet application for reading, acquiring, and organizing digital books and other publications. Digital Editions 1.7 greatly expands language support.

ePubPreflight version 0.1.0 (was "stylecheck")

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:19:24 -0800

There's a new tool for checking ePub files. The tool does not do validation, that is the role of the epubcheck tool. The epubpreflight tool is intended to check the things that are not mentioned in the EPUB spec, but that could be issues in one environment or another.

ePubPreflight can be found in the epubcheck downloads.

If you'd like to discuss the tool, head on over to the epubcheck discussion area

I'll be updating the project pages with instructions on how to use the ePubPreflight, but it's just like using epubcheck. (Run at a command line, and use 'java -jar epubpreflight-0.1.0.jar myEPub.epub'.)

A tool to compliement epubcheck, "stylecheck".

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:56:53 -0800

Recently I mentioned that I'm working on improving epubcheck, but then I was asked, "what about the items that don't relate to validation, but really should be checked anyway?"

The issues at hand are things like the 300k file size limit on content files, 10MB limit on images, and complexity issues with CSS.

The solution is a tool tentatively called "stylecheck" that would run much like the epubcheck tool, but would look for issues that are important to the reading systems, but are not necessarily issues of conformance.

An initial release of the tool alert the user to problems if it found:
* 300k or bigger chapter files.
* 10MB or larger images.
* CSS stylesheet with more than some number of styles (150?)

I could see other uses for the tool, checks to make sure that the package for a NIMAS submission has DTBook content rather than XHTML, or checks to make sure the publisher information in metadata is in the approved format. However the first step will be to create the tool and get the basic checks working.

Which is a work underway, and you should see something relatively soon on the epubcheck project pages.

Taking epubcheck (epub validtation tool) forward.

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:58:12 -0800

The epubcheck is a validation tool for ePub documents. It should determine whether the ePub under inspection conforms to the rules laid out in the IDPF specifications. In many circumstances it does just that, but it's not always clear what's happening, and sometimes the tool out and out fails. Of course the community is working to bring the tool forward and make it better.

Here I will give an outline of current and ongoing changes that I'm planning to make. Of course I would also like to put out a call for additional contribution/involvement in the process. There's plenty of room for more people to contribute, whether it be in the form of development, testing, review, or documentation. Anyone looking to get involved should head on over to the discussion group.

So here's the current changes I've added, and things I'll be working on:

The Mars Project "PDFXML Inspector" works great as an ePub editing tool.

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:16:00 -0800

If you've just created an ePub and now you want to make a small change, the normal approach is to rename the file with a "zip" extension, extract the contents, make the change, and then repackage the contents.

Fortunately, there's a better way, but I'm not sure if it's been mentioned.
It's from the Mars Project over on Adobe Labs, and it's called the "PDFXML Inspector".

Export ePub from InDesign CS4

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:23:49 -0800

With the release of Adobe InDesign CS4 you'll find that there's a couple of interesting new features in the Export for Digital Editions plug-in. The most noticeable are the addition of DTBook support and support for "Local Formatting". There's also some subtler changes, like floating anchored images and additional semantic information in the XHTML files.

So we'll go through the major new features and what each one does: