Any book e-book designers out there?

[Darin Boville]

I'm looking for a photo book designer for publishing an e-book (ibook, Kindle).

Basically I have a book idea, photos, text and I want it made into a beautiful e-book in EPUB format that passes technical approval at Apple and Amazon.

I would much rather pay someone rather than learn this stuff myself.

Does anyone here do this? Know anyone who does this?

Anyone here published an e-book of their own with advice to share?

Thanks,

--Darin

[Ed Kelsey]

I think it is difficult or impossible to put images in an eBook.

[Darin Boville]

Ignoring the spam from paabeen (which *almost* makes sense being in this thread--must be some sort of keyword search spam...

I've been thinking about this and talking to folks--maybe refiguring the idea as an app might be more interesting....hmmmm.

Any iOS app coders out there?

--Darin

[J D Clark]

Darin,
I was preparing an answer when you posted your question about IOS -- I primarily write native applications for iPad, but I've dabbled with ePub books also. Images can be included in ebooks, but are in B&W on Kindle devices. iBooks on iPhone and iPad can of course be in color.
Whether what you want is best in an ePub book, or something like a native application in book form (like the Ansel Adams iPad app) somewhat depends on what you want to do, or how you want it to work.
If you’d like to start a dialog on how this would work, and what’s next, send me a private message.

John Clark

[Darin Boville]

Hey JD,

Sent you a PM...

--Darin

[Frank Petronio]

I'd be curious to be privy as to why you might do an app versus an ePub book? Call me nosey....

[Darin Boville]

I'd be curious to be privy as to why you might do an app versus an ePub book? Call me nosey....

Books are dead.

E-books are just pictures of dead books.

--Darin

[Rakesh Malik]

A lot of the newer readers will display PDF's natively, IIRC including iPad and the new Nook Color. Unless you're after a more sophisticated interactive or multimedia experience, that isn't actually all that complicated, so it could be a good way to go.

[Allen Rumme]

Darin,

I have experimented with making an e-book of some of my images. It is not as straight forward as one would hope. The first thing to keep in mind is that e-books were designed to present text, not necessarily images. E-book readers have the ability to re-paginate a book depending on the display area available to it. In other words, there is not a static formatting of the material, it is dynamic. This makes keeping an image and any associated captions or text on the same page a challenge. In addition, by default, when an e-book is created all images go to the end of the book, at least that is how I understand the e-book creation process. There appear to be methods for placing images in a book at a specific location, but they seemed overly complicated.

I have opted to produce interactive pdf's of some of my work. This is a much more straight forward process and one can control how everything looks. If you will go to folios under the "images" section of my web site, you can download one of the pdf's I created. BTW, these are intended to be downloaded and viewed with Acrobat reader in full screen mode. Browsers don't support the interactive features, so viewing them that way is not as good.

Hope this helps.

[Henry Ambrose]

I'd go with an Acrobat book. It'll look great and run on just about anything. I've made some little text note cards sized to fit the iPhone screen and it works well, as would be expected.

I downloaded Allen's "Knifemakers" and then moved it to my phone and it works fine. It should be very, very good on an iPad.