What Can Publishers Learn from Digital Comic Books?
The transition to digital began with reliance on VIZ's prepress house to create the sequential JPEG files that comprised the digital books. Once it became obvious that economies of scale were needed, VIZ developed its own internal workflow, involving automated cropping, color correction, and generation of end-user formats. The company is now exploring responsive design techniques for some of its non-manga content, and currently uses EPUB 3 for some of its supported ebook platforms. Singh noted that the enhanced capabilities of EPUB 3 are currently used only in special cases—such as books with built-in video components—but is evaluating increased use for other interactive titles.
John Parsons (john@intuideas.com), former Editorial Director of The Seybold Report, is an independent writer, ghostwriter, and editor. He is the co-author of the interactive printed textbook, Introduction to Graphic Communication, on the art, science and business of print, which has been adopted by Ryerson, Arizona State, the University of Houston, and many other schools and vocational training centers. Custom editions of the book are under consideration by major printing companies and franchises for internal training purposes.