title: “Needed: ebook authoring tools” categories: [“Education”, “Bibliomane”]

I’ve been writing a self-published textbook that is sold in hardcopy, Kindle format, and an iOS app.  I firmly believe that ebooks are the future of textbooks, though unfortunately today’s e-textbooks are inferior versions of their print counterparts.  To that end, my co-author Dave Patterson and I took many steps to make the ebook version the preferred version of our book—not by crippling the print version, but by exploiting ebook features that you can’t do in print.

Our original vision was to make the richest version an iOS/Android version, in which we could use extensive CSS and JavaScript to make the book experience interactive in ways that the Kindle ebook format doesn’t support.  We originally tried using PhoneGap for this work, but it wasn’t stable because apparently it wasn’t designed to deal with such large assets (hundreds of KB per HTML “page”, plus many MB of images, plus GB of embedded screencast videos).  When Apple released iBooks Author, we realized we’d have to switch to that, since doing a “native” Android or iOS app was beyond our resources.  We ended up with much of what we wanted—better navigation both within and across chapters, embedded screencasts, and even interactive “check your understanding” question widgets that don’t reveal the answer until you try to answer the question.  But it came at great cost and pain: as we describe below, iBooks Author doesn’t import any useful markup format, even though it generates ePub.

Our experience with doing our own layout and publishing for the print and Kindle editions suggests that the majority of self-publishers and ebook authors may well want to work with a publisher.  The self-publishing process even even for simple hardcopy books is not trivial, but a process that can produce multiple formats with radically different output requirements from a single set of source files is definitely not for the faint of heart.  I described ina n earlier post how we generally did it for our book, concluding that  LaTeX is the worst way to prepare an ebook, except for all the others.

So what do we need?  A better unified authoring environment is a must.  What would my ideal authoring environment support?

If you’re thinking of self-publishing, be aware that you’ll have to take care of a lot of “little” typographic things that the publisher usually does, including but not limited to: getting “straight quotes” and “smart quotes”’ right; getting em-dashes and en-dashes rather than ’—’ and ‘–’; inserting © and ™ rather than typing ‘(C)’ or ‘(tm)’; dealing with ligatures (TeX does this for you, but most word processors don’t).  But the biggest one is going to be the hardest for Word users: getting accustomed to automating everything using macros so that changes are easy to make.  If you are used to manually styling your text (changing font size, applying indentation, etc.) rather than rigorously using styles, you’re sunk before you start, and so is your publisher (well, they’re not sunk; they’ll just charge you a lot of money for doing a labor-intensive manual job).

Here’s a list of our original “blue sky” desiderata for a software engineering ebook, and how we did on each one.