There’s a famous adage: Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. When we’re creating eBooks there are some design elements we can’t control — the most important of which is text size. One of the hallmarks of eBooks is that readers can resize the text to suit their needs. For readers like me, this is great; I prefer to my eBook text is just a bit bigger than usual. Read more…
This is the second post in an on-going, multi-part series about Vook’s powerful text styling capabilities. Read Part 1, and make sure to stay tuned into our blog for weekly updates. Last week I showed you how to use quotes and tip boxes. Today’s topic is… Captions Did you know that captions created with Vook always stay on the same page as their images? All you need to do is let Vook know what is a caption and what isn’t. To Read more…
Vook has an unparalleled ability to create great-looking eBooks. It’s all thanks to our Style editor—a proprietary tool that empowers you to edit and create a stylesheet without knowing any code. This week and the next, I’m going to show you tips for unlocking the Style editor’s full capabilities for designing text—everything from setting the margins to controlling the spacing between lines. Today, we’re going to focus on tip boxes and block quotes. Tip boxes are like callouts or sidebars inside textbooks: they Read more…
So, you’ve written a great book. Now people will just automagically discover it and suddenly you’ll be a best selling author, right? Not surprisingly, it’s a bit more complicated than that. We wanted to give you a little advice, based on our experience working in digital publishing. Today, we’ll look at how to spread the word through social media. First of all, which networks should you be on? Most of our resources focus on Twitter and Facebook because that’s where Read more…
People wax nostalgic about the smell of books, but no one pines for the smell of textbooks. They smelled like glue, they were heavy, and they were—usually—boring. So we were happy to read Apple’s announcement of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author: finally, a kind of book everyone wants to see go digital fast. It’s a great announcement for digital publishing, for readers, and for platform and tool creators like us. It also raises some interesting complications that we’ve spent months Read more…
This post is a digression. We’re a platform focused on helping you create quality ebooks that you can distribute everywhere, but! I have seen much discussion recently about when enhanced ebooks work. Having produced 800 + enhanced titles, I wanted to weigh in — mostly on a personal level — to relate my particular feelings that I can no longer keep bottled up. When it comes to enhancements, book lovers like to say they work fine for non-fiction, but fiction’s Read more…
A post at TechCrunch by Eric Ries this morning caught my attention — it speaks to a core issue we’re wrestling with as we engineer new features and functionality into our digital book creation platform, VookMaker. Ries asks the question, “How do you know you’re building the right product — if you’re not talking to your customers?” Of course, he asks a lot of other things — but I’m going to focus narrowly on the bit relevant to us, so Read more…
We certainly saw that last week at BEA – with newer, cheaper devices from Cooler and BEbook starting to steal a little of the thunder from the Kindle and Sony readers. Now, this week, a new report from Forrester that points to growing market for eBooks and eReader devices. So why the growth? Epps acknowledges that Forrester’s initial reaction to the Kindle as a niche device that would only attract a small number of book-loving early adopters underestimated the fact Read more…
