Category Archives: Book Production

Printing consolidation necessary to survive

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Printing consolidation necessary: Xerox buying R.R. Donnelley This is all part of the consolidation necessary to make these hugely expensive presses run. Hardware prices make printing consolidation necessary. The article in Publishing Executive only covers magazines. But it goes much further than that. In my world, everything is on-demand. This includes the on-demand presses, and the four ereaders: Kindle, iPad/Phone, Nook, & Kobo. We’ll see this change here also. Someone will take on Ingram, just like someone will take … Continue reading →

Where is the future of books?

Skilled Workman Posted on by

I just posted a link to this article from The Bookseller: stating the digital revolution is definitely not over. Of course, that is one of those DUH! facts. The future of books is even more complex than you may think, though. How do we deal with audio, video, interactive content, and so on? Basically… The future of books is in the readers’ hands We really don’t know where it will go. Is a book, with a movie … Continue reading →

Amazon still doing Kindle book modification

Skilled Workman Posted on by

I received this in an email from Aaron Shepard this morning. I didn’t get permission to copy this, but I’ve done what I can to make sure you know this is Aaron’s writing. Evidently, Kindle book modification is still a problem after they are uploaded in the name of “better typography”. Aaron has some serious questions about this process. It is certainly something of which to be aware. The following quote is from Aaron’s email: One of the problems in … Continue reading →

Color e-ink paperwhite: coming soon?

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Gizmag has an interesting article today about color e-Ink. They claim it will not have any impact on ereaders. I hope they are wrong. Paperwhites, and their ilk, are one of the largest drags of ebook publishing today. They are great for simple novels and white papers. They are quite bad for non-fiction with its need for complex lists, large tables, color images, and so on. Color e-ink could bring the most popular ereaders to a new … Continue reading →

For an Author Website I recommend a WordPress blog

Skilled Workman Posted on by

For an Author Website I recommend a WordPress blog — A traditional static site starts at about two grand. But, a fully interactive, responsive site with e-commerce can easily start at $50,000 US and go much higher than that. Obviously, this is much more than most of us need as authors—maybe. It’s also far beyond our budgets in most cases. If you want a good article on excellent author sites, from a worldly point of view, here’s … Continue reading →

Keeping your mind open to creative typographic solutions

Skilled Workman Posted on by

One of the main troubles we have in setting books for readability is the set of largely subconscious rules we’ve learned over the years. In an entertaining and useful article today by Jonathan Hoefler named: How to Use Clashing Fonts He gives us several examples showing why it is necessary to break common “rules” in the interest of both style and readability. In the example he gives above, he shows the use of two virtually identical Dutch Old … Continue reading →

Book typography: The reality of picking fonts

Skilled Workman Posted on by

The basic parts of type Again, we need some more basic language definitions. You can see above how the point size of the type relates to the ascender, cap height, x-height, baseline, and descender. More importantly, you get a glimpse of things that are important in the world of typography. This illustration is from my font design book, Practical Font Design With FontLab 5, which is available in print as well as ebooks at iBookstore, NookBooks, Kobo, Scribd, and … Continue reading →

Does InDesign finally have a strong competitor?

Skilled Workman Posted on by

I’ve always disliked QuarkXPress. Even when it was king of the hill, I was using PageMaker and InDesign 1.0. But there’s no denying that it was King—until it shot itself in the foot. It treated it’s customers very poorly, and its upgrade policies were ridiculously expensive. When InDesign came out with unlimited redoes, OpenType support, no need for a separate frame tool, and dozens of other major features, Quark was left behind, very rapidly. Is InDesign the … Continue reading →

Is Kindle worse or just archaic?

Skilled Workman Posted on by

Mumble, grumble, PITA, ;oebpa;b/ hkvo… Ok! Now that’s off my chest. I just had fits with a Kindle book for a client. I use to do them first (after the print/PDF versions were complete) because they were such a pain in the a…, but I’ve begun doing them last because they’re just bleah. Working with Kindle formatting seems like stepping back a decade. For me, the ePUB problems have largely been solved: paragraph shading, anchored graphics, embedded … Continue reading →