Ebooks
You’re an organisation, publisher, or individual who has produced a print book, and now you need to convert it into a professional ebook. It is complex, containing lots of images, graphs, footnotes, or other features, and you need an experienced pro to help you produce a quality, error-free ebook. You also want an ebook that is fully accessible to all, including those with visual and other impairments. Your EPUB must conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
If this sounds like what you need, get in touch to find out more about ebooks by Liquid Type.
It’s easy to create an ebook these days. There are many point-and-click solutions you can use to quickly and easily make ebooks. But in some cases, where the book’s layout is more complex, it’s much harder to produce a good ebook. An example is a book with many tables, graphs, figures, links, endnotes, and images.
Many designers use InDesign to lay out print books. While the software has made it easier to create ebooks, these conversions still need a lot of work to make sure they are of good quality. This is why it’s a good idea to get an ebook specialist to help you. Ideally, this person should be meticulous or even have proofreading experience. It’s very easy to introduce new errors while making an ebook.
Another vital aspect to consider is accessibility. Is your ebook accessible to people with visual or other impairments? Many ebook converters and creators don’t factor this into their workflow. At Liquid Type, our mission is to ensure your content is as accessible as possible and conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the internationally recognised standard for creating accessible web-based content.
Many designers use InDesign to lay out print books. While the software has made it easier to create ebooks, these conversions still need a lot of work to make sure they are of good quality. This is why it’s a good idea to get an ebook specialist to help you. Ideally, this person should be meticulous or even have proofreading experience. It’s very easy to introduce new errors while making an ebook.
Another vital aspect to consider is accessibility. Is your ebook accessible to people with visual or other impairments? Many ebook converters and creators don’t factor this into their workflow. At Liquid Type, our mission is to ensure your content is as accessible as possible and conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the internationally recognised standard for creating accessible web-based content.
Many people with visual and cognitive impairments use assistive technologies like screen readers to access ebooks. If your content is not optimised for these, their reading experience will be poor.
The aim is to provide equal access to all readers. However, accessibility is not only for those with impairments. It improves everyone’s experience.
The aim is to provide equal access to all readers. However, accessibility is not only for those with impairments. It improves everyone’s experience.
When converting or creating an ebook, we build accessibility in from the start. We have experience evaluating ebooks for conformity to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, so we know what to look out for. Some of these aspects include:
- ensuring the HTML is well-formed, hierarchical, and semantically tagged so that assistive technologies can better render the content
- correctly placing items in lists so that readers can easily skip through content as needed
- not using images of text
- avoiding exclusionary visual cues
- marking language shifts to help screen readers correctly vocalise the text
- making sure there is sufficient colour contrast so that the text is legible for readers with visual impairments
- using Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) labels to identify elements better
- adding discovery metadata that helps readers know if your ebook is suitable for them and has the accessibility features they need
- correctly and richly describing images for readers who can’t see them
- always including sufficient navigation, and
- using digital page markers so everyone can follow along in educational and other settings.
Not all ebooks are made the same. Here are some of the most common mistakes in ebooks produced by suppliers or authors:
- hyperlinks don’t work
- links on contents pages don’t work (this includes on the contents page in the text itself as well as on the navigational table of contents that appears as a drop-down menu in ebook readers)
- there are formatting errors
- images are poor quality and not optimised (ebook covers, in particular, are not optimised according to vendor guidelines)
- fonts are embedded (in order to distribute a font included in an ebook, you need to make sure you have the licence to do so)
- basic text errors are introduced
- styles are not consistently applied
- internal metadata is missing (many suppliers and authors do not include the book’s title, author(s), description, ISBN(s), publisher, accessibility information, and language in the ebook’s internal metadata)
- there is no hierarchy of typographic elements (headers are too large, body text is too small, and the elements have been sized for print, so they don’t work well together on screen)
- ebook files fail vendor quality-control checks because they have not been validated against ebook-format standards, and
- little or no effort has been made to ensure the ebook meets the requirements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, so the ebook is not suitable for people with visual, auditory, or other impairments.
Ebooks created by Liquid Type are individually tailored, and all technical production is handled in-house. This means that ebooks by Liquid Type are produced with fine attention to detail, and distinctive consideration is given to preserving the title’s print composition while meeting the demands of adaptable, reflowable rendering across a range of devices and platforms.
Liquid Type takes the following steps in our ebook workflow:
Liquid Type takes the following steps in our ebook workflow:
- every ‘page’ and paragraph is checked against the source print document to ensure there are no formatting errors or discrepancies
- all images are individually optimised for quality and file size
- ebooks are checked on multiple devices and platforms
- the code is carefully checked for anomalies and errors
- styles are consistently applied (this results in coherent, logical, and minimal stylesheets, meaning there are fewer errors and it’s easier to update the ebook in future)
- the golden ratio is applied to ensure there is a hierarchy of typographic elements
- through quality-assurance checks performed by a professional proofreader, as well as various automated checks, errors are picked up and passed on to the author or publisher (this often means that the ebook’s text is cleaner than that of the print book), and
- when converting books with a high-end design into a reflowable ebook, Liquid Type simplifies and reconceptualises the format to ensure the ebook works well on all devices while still being attractive.
Conversions from InDesign source files to EPUB cost between R16 and R38 per typeset page, depending on the complexity of the conversion. The cost of creating ebooks from other source files depends on the format of the original document and the complexity of the job. Liquid Type can produce ebooks from all source documents, including hard copy books.
It takes about a week to create an ebook for an average-length manuscript of 70 000 words.
Get in touch and send me a few sample pages of your book, a description of the project (including any special design features to be included), the number of images and tables contained in the book, and the total page or word count. Please also let me know what the format of the source document is that I’ll be using to create your ebook.
Liquid Type has provided an EPUB conversion service to Jonathan Ball Publishers on numerous occasions … I greatly enjoy working with Wesley. His prices are not only competitive, but he is knowledgeable about his trade and always willing to share that information. Wesley goes the extra mile to ensure his clients are happy, meeting deadlines with a can-do, professional attitude while he creates functional, attractive ebooks. I would definitely recommend Wesley as a converter to anyone seeking this service.
