Ebooks

Electronic books are a major factor in the modern publishing business. According to BookNet Canada, “61% of readers read at least one ebook in 2019,” and “20% bought an ebook (an 11% increase from 2018).” Quick, efficient and accessible conversions are key to success in this market.

I started working with ebooks in 2015, and today I regularly provide conversion services to several BC publishers, including Harbour Publishing, Douglas & McIntyre, Nightwood Editions and Caitlin Press.

My specialty is preparing reflowable ebooks from Adobe InDesign files after the print edition is ready. Depending on the project, the process can include adding live hyperlinks, such as for bibliographical sources, cross-references or notes; improving the typography for a reflowable context; adding several accessibility features; and extensive post-export cleanup of the XHTML code. All this is done while preserving, to the extent possible, the content order and design style from the print edition.

Since 2018, I have been working to improve the accessibility of the ebooks I produce. In 2020, I participated in an accessibility audit with NNELS, the National Network for Equitable Library Service, and made several adjustments and improvements to my workflow as a result. Accessibility features I can help with include semantic tagging, navigational aids like page lists and hierarchical tables of contents, descriptive text, and others.

I test every ebook with EPUBcheck and ACE by Daisy and manually check them in Apple iBooks and Amazon Kindle. My ebooks are made to function well across most modern readers but degrade gracefully in older systems and often include fancy code that I hope will gain wider adoption in the future.

All books I design get every ebook feature mentioned above added as a matter of course in the typesetting stage. Learn more about my book design work.