Narayana Press eBooks
What is an eBook?
An eBook is like an ordinary printed book – only in a digital form, which can be downloaded directly from the internet.
What are the advantages of eBooks?
You can search for text, insert digital bookmarks, highlight passages, make notes, or look up words in an integrated dictionary or on the internet. You can navigate using the Electronic Table of Contents - which is often very detailed and exists in several versions - and with the aid of built-in hyperlinks, for example at notes and references to illustrations and the like. Another possibility is to open web pages or to send emails by clicking on the built-in links. You can zoom into the pictures. One single eBook Reader can store serveral hundred titles at a time.
Preparing a Manuscript for eBook publication
The preparation of an eBook manuscript is basically the same as with a printed book. Apart from that it is an advantage if styles are being used for the different text types and if illustrations together with captions are being placed in the text of the manuscript.
Is it possible to use the prepress work of a previously printed book for the publication of an eBook?
All repro work which has been done before printing a book can as well be used for the production of an eBook. In order to be able to publish it as eBook the text has to be formatted with styles. Illustrations have to be placed so they will always follow the text
Should colour illustrations be converted?
Because an eBook Reader displays colours in RGB the best result is achieved when colour illustrations are converted to RGB.
The most popular formats are ePub, PDF and Kindle
ePub
The most popular type of eBook is the open standard ePub, where text and picture always adjust to the screen. ePub can therefore be read on both Smartphones, Tablets, actual eBook Readers and ordinary computers, regardless of their operating system. ePubs are very flexible, because you can choose to adjust the size of the text and select between different fonts. In some reading programs, as for example Bluefire, you can change the colour of the text and the background, turn hyphenation on or off, choose whether the text should be aligned or left-aligned, and adjust margins.
PDF is suitable for richly illustrated eBooks, where it is desired to preserve design and typography, and for complicated books with long tables, graphs, formulas, indexes and the like. In addition to several types of Tables of Contents, navigation buttons, hyperlinks to navigation and opening of weblinks, the index will often be interactive as well. In some PDF Reading Software such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, text and images can be adapted to the screen, like in ePub.
Kindle
Kindle eBook Reader uses a special file format (.mobi). Most ePubs can be converted and read on Kindle without problems.
A brief history of eBooks
The development of digital books began in the early 70´s. It was Michael S. Hart who created the first eBook on a supercomputer at the University of Illinois. In order to publish eBooks for common use he launched Project Gutenberg, which nowadays contains a large library of 36.000 eBooks. Every week about 50 titles are being added to this library.
What does an eBook file contain?
An eBook is a Package file containing several separate files. The single files consist of HTML, XML-codes, fonts and text only. The codes which are being used are known from the programming of websites.
