Digital Books - History and a Challenge

[paneerakbari]

I have (what I assume to be) a fairly modest library of game books and manuals, almost entirely in the RPG genre and, to a one, they are PDFs.

These come from a few different sources, Drive-Thru RPG/DMs Guild, itch.io, various Humble Bundles… Many of these titles are digital versions of print-published books, so this makes some sense: the publishers are already delivering a fully-designed layout document to the printers, and their teams of artists, layout specialists, and writers are (probably? God, I hope this is the case) using purpose-built toolchains designed specifically to that end. That same document can lose the printing and color marks needed by the print shop (this should be an automated process during the PDF render, or at least it was for the mail-order retailer I worked for an age ago) and uploaded to various marketplaces.

So, yeah, that process probably works great for Modiphius or Wizards of the Coast, because when they sell me a digital, PDF version of Star Trek Adventures or the Monster Manual, they “just” re-purpose an existing document that they already had to create in order to create the physical editions of those books.

But this production model absolutely sucks for creators who already know their primary distribution channel is digital or who never intend to make a printed product. PDFs are absolutely bonkers complex - seriously!

All the complexity of a PDF exists for a reason, it’s not just there to pad Adobe’s revenues (anymore). The file extension stands for Portable Document Format and it hails all the way back to the late-20th, introduced the same year as Bill Clinton’s first inauguration (that’s 1993, young-uns). Three decades later we’re still using the things, which is fine, because they’re still useful… but they’re also a massive pain in the ass that’s only work enduring if you need to make a Document that is Portable between digital and analog Formats.

In the numerous feline lifespans that have passed since G. H. W. Bush got pink-slipped by voters, hundreds (at least) of different formats have come and gone. One of those in particular should be really, really interesting to anyone authoring digital documents: EPUB. If you’ve ever read an e-book, odds are it was delivered to your device as an EPUB (or, ick, a mobi ).

EPUB isn’t new, the standard was formalized in 2007, but it’s been steadily developed and improved since then by the W3C, the same open standards body that is responsible for defining the HTML that every website in existence relies on. EPUB is, unsurprisingly, based on a markup language (same as HTML), so the barriers to entry for aspiring - or actual - digital publishers is much, much lower in terms of tooling, knowledge, and skill.

Odds are that you (or your audience) are going to end up reading on a small phone screen at some point, or on a tablet, or a computer screen, maybe even a television - why futz around with the PDF pinch-and-zoom nonsense when there’s a digital-native format (EPUB) that will automatically, intelligently, cleanly re-size and re-flow the text to fit the display it appears on?

Here’s the challenge(s) I’m issuing:

• if you’re an author/designer/editor: target EPUB for your digital versions
• start asking for EPUBs from digital distributors

[DarkplaneDM]

I need to see what I can do design-wise with epub. I’m guilty of totally ignoring it until the last couple years. Can it do full image renders just like a pdf? What programs are best for reading epub on desktop?

[paneerakbari]

My Linux bias is showing, because my options are an embarrassment of riches, with the top options being (in no order):

• Calibre (can also convert between/among PDF, EPUB, MOBI)
• Sigil (technically an EPUB editor)
• FBReader (terrible name, evokes the blue-F)
• Foliate
• Ubuntu Desktop comes pre-loaded with a decent one, but I can’t find it now

On Android, I’ve been using ReadEra and find that it hits everything I want from it: it renders the book on the screen of my device. I would love to get rid of the ads without an ongoing subscription, but that’s more a gripe with the reality of app marketplaces than the app itself.

Calibre is broadly cross-platform, so I know it works consistently across Windows, MacOS (they still calling it that? what’s its name lately?), and Linux. It is technically more of a library manager, but it is supremely feature-rich and extended with plug-ins from a healthy community of contributors and supporters. I host my digital library with Calibre (I’ll spare the technical details of that implementation).

I have dipped my toe in Sigil for all of 10 minutes. It is cross-platform, but it’s default view is a triptych of the book’s files, markup (XML) code, and a “live” preview of the rendered book. That prominent code editor is probably a big turn-off, especially because that’s the editing surface. It at least blends the notions of a code editor and a WYSIWYG editor by having formatting toolbars that add the proper code elements.\

I also expect there’s a different design paradigm between EPUB and PDF. Both are capable of producing fixed layouts, with each element on the page showing up in exactly the same way and place across viewports. EPUB, however, can dynamically re-flow text and rescale design elements to flexibly fit smaller displays (like phones). I’ve heard a rumor that it can even automatically re-flow text from two-column to single-column based on the display size. That makes it much, much more like designing a webpage than a book, but (should) also makes that book more accessible in different formats

I’ll mock up a demo and post it later

[paneerakbari]

@DarkplaneDM - here’s something I threw together in about 20 minutes, most of which was just me sourcing assets and fiddling with different things to see how they’d work

I did this in Sigil, which definitely has some limitations, but there’s a lot of functionality by way of being all-but real HTML.

This definitely would not be the way to go for a fixed, defined layout for something like a print book, but digital-native documents are much more compelling.

RookAndStone_ExploringEPUB_MadeInSigil.epub ← it’s a OneDrive link and previewing sucks, it’s also fairly large (16MB) because of assets in the file.

Feel free to explore that file a bit, it’s 255 paragraphs of lorem ipsum with some notes from me on what’s going on.

Screenshots (from laptop, Foliate app)

This is from within the app Foliate, in dark mode, default settings. We see full-color (depends on the display device) images in a two-column format - even though the contents are just paragraphs of text thrown into the creator.

Here I’ve switched over to a light theme to show a (totally un-formatted) random dice table, as well as some custom-formatted callout boxes.

And this is a display configuration screen from Foliate, showing that it can handle multi-column layout, changing line-height, color scheme, etc. The point here is more that the software used for reading the book better empowers the reader and provides them with the opportunity to bring their own accessibility tools to the reading experience.

Phone Screens

Nevermind that I was too quick on some of the screenshots, that’s my bad

Text is automatically re-flowed and sized to the smaller format

Images get in-lined correctly, without overflowing the viewport width

This one’s a miss: the image of the wanderer was supposed to be smaller and in-line with the text. This is probably due to the ReadEra app “helping”
Also, it’s not very visible, but SVGs don’t work in all reader clients - that’s something to be aware of if you use vector graphics extensively (like me)

Interestingly, ReadEra automatically applied some styling to the table, other apps didn’t do that

No video or audio in the phone app, but they worked on the desktop app. Moral of the story: YMMV with more “exotic” digital formats

[DarkplaneDM]

Yeah I would say 90% of my stuff would lost a big part of the visual appeal/design (which I’m biased toward because that’s my job on projects like The Last Caravan and Sequel). But for certain types of book I could see it being a better format.