In order to validate my observations, I turned to friend and colleague, Joshua Tallent, chief ebook architect at eBook Architects. Joshua is one of my gurus for all things EPUB. Joshua echoed what I am seeing in terms of shaky EPUB data quality. "Publishers are either unaware of the issues of data quality in their EPUB files or unable to make changes needed to improve it. Publishers who outsource their work to vendors are at the mercy of the vendor’s practices and tools. Publishers who create their ebooks in-house run into other problems if they are relying on one-button conversion tools (as found in InDesign) without first defining well-formed manuscripts. These tools tend to be garbage in, garbage out, so the quality of the EPUB files coming out the other side is usually not very good.”
- People:
- Joshua Tallent