February 2012 Archives
Last week I ended Part 1 of this saga of creating an eBook for distribution to online bookstores with the promise that in this installment I'd share with you why mastering this new domain of publishing is somewhat akin to herding cats. But before I get to covering some of the resources I've tapped to access the arcane knowledge required for successful eBook creation, a look at production tools is in order.
When a friend asked me recently if I'd provide a hand turning her first non-fiction book into a self-published eBook, I agreed without giving it much thought. After all, eBooks have been around for some time now. Certainly long enough for the establishment of robust eBook file formats and for book creation tools to have matured to the point where they can handle whatever was required. I had Adobe's Creative Suite on my hard drive, so how difficult could creating an eBook be? I can almost hear you laughing.
I have to confess that I'm amongst those who viewed with mixed emotions the 2010 launch of what was then called the Google Font Directory. Way back in 2006 I had written optimistically, in The Web — A Typographic Wasteland No More?, about the typographic possibilities that upcoming extensions to CSS could finally open up for the use of fonts on websites. But when Google introduced its web fonts initiative, made possible by the CSS3 @font-face standard, cloud computing and modern browsers, I shared a collective shudder with those in the type community.
