A colleague linked me recently to an article on The State of eBook Typography. One interesting takeaway: except for devices like the new iPad (a.k.a. iPad 3), device display technology has yet to catch up with print, sometimes making text hard to read. When I’m reading eBooks on some devices, I tend to turn the text size way up. While ultimately your reader’s device and font size are out of your control, Vook does make it easy to get a gorgeously-designed digital 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…
The two most popular eBook formats are ePub and KF8. ePub is used by Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, and many other retail channels. KF8 (formerly Mobi), on the other hand, is a proprietary format used only by Amazon. Vook makes it a snap to design eBooks in both ePub and KF8 formats, because you can quickly create an eBook in either format on the Preview page. ePub and KF8, though, support different settings in the Style editor. We’ve outlined them Read more…
With a little bit of smart tagging, Microsoft Word can become a Vook pre-production powerhouse. To create eBooks quickly and easily, use Microsoft Word’s Styles as you’re preparing your manuscript. 1. First, open the Styles Gallery. Usually, it’s in the Microsoft Word “ribbon” at the top of your page. You can also open a small Styles toolbox by going to View > Styles. 2. Then, apply the Title style to your chapter titles. To apply a style, just place your cursor inside Read more…
Vook allows you to create eBooks quickly and easily. Just how quickly? In January, one of our production experts created an eBook on the Digital Book World stage in 5 minutes and 18 seconds. The secret is to already have a sense of how you want your eBook to look. (It also helps to have properly prepared your text, images, and video or audio files.) When I’m building eBooks, I use a trick called Creating a Stylesheet Template. Stylesheet templates Read more…
This weekend, the New York Times suggested that “E-Books Make Readers Less Isolated.” The article asserts that someone carrying a new e-reading device or tablet is inviting conversation and interaction. “Strangers constantly ask about it,” Michael Hughes, a communications associate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said of his iPad, which he uses to read a mix of novels and nonfiction. “It’s almost like having a new baby.” An iPad owner for four months, Mr. Hughes Read more…
To those who think the magazine industry just doesn’t get it — and I know who you are, all 20 million of you — I direct your attention to this cool little thing vook’s Joel Burshem turned me on to: It’s a video ad stuck smack in the middle of an issue of good old fashioned Entertainment Weekly. As Joel said, it might scare the pants off you if you didn’t know it was there, but if the goal of Read more…
Big news this morning. Google announces a brand new operating system based on its Chrome Browser – Google Chrome OS. Details on what it’ll look like are bit sketchy, but there is no doubt. This is huge, huge move for the search giant to make. Why, you ask? The New York Times categorizes this as a first leap into the clouds where ultimately all applications are hosted online. Google’s plans for the new operating system fit its Internet-centric vision of Read more…
I sound a bit like a broken record these days. Speed and video. Speed and video. Only last week it was the new iPhone touting these two words. Now it’s the turn of the Mozilla Foundation who today released a new version of its wildly popular Firefox browser. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5Zbc-Rg6e8[/youtube] Firefox 3.5 comes with a slew of new features but the ones that most interest here at Vook are its pronounced improvements in rendering Javascript (in layman’s terms, makes everything feel Read more…
