EC Book production.docVIP

Book production Papering over e-books Apr 15th 2014, 14:00?by G.F. | SEATTLE ONE might easily think that print publishing is a fussy business: all of that preparation to put ink on paper seems rather last century—or last half millennium. Electronic books have been hailed as the future and the perfection of the codex format, because of their ease of production, distribution, and infinite perfect replication. Yet this Babbage has found that not to be the case, even though he has worked with e-books for decades across many formats. Your correspondent also has printers ink in his veins: he trained as one of the last dedicated typesetters, worked in a printing plant in his 20s, and designed and produced dozens of books in the 1980s and 1990s. But even he was unprepared for how easy it has become to print a book and how difficult it remains to produce an electronic version suitable for a range of e-readers, including the Kindle. As the result of?a Kickstarter campaign, Babbage hired designers he knew and a recommended printer, and contracted to have made 1,500 copies of a 216book with a clothbound hardcover and dust jacket. While the process took longer than hed hoped and expected due to his own bandwidth limitations, once the digital files went into the printing firms operations, there was little to do but wait as a series of specialists carried out successive tasks at the printing plant. The final result exceeded his expectations, and as the projects backers have received the tome, delighted e-mails and tweets abound. However, once the layout files had headed to far Wisconsin (Babbage is in Seattle; his designers in Maine), your correspondent turned to what he deemed to be the easier task of converting the layout file first to a hyperlinked PDF document, and then to the EPUB format used in most e-book hardware and software, and to MOBI, Amazons proprietary and simplified analogue of EPUB. (Individual e-readers may wrap EPUB with encryption for digital rights manage