As book publishers adapt to a world where both print and digital editions are desirable to readers, it is important for us to focus on formatting the content in a way that best suits how it is being read. But what readers, authors, publishers, and retailers often forget...
Liisa McCloy-Kelley
Ellen Harvey is a freelance writer and editor who covers the latest technologies and strategies reshaping the publishing landscape. She previously served as the Senior Editor at Publishing Executive and Book Business.
While the majority of ebooks have yet to provide the interactive, multi-layered experiences some technologists have anticipated, ebook technology continues to make significant strides. According to Liisa McCloy-Kelley, vice president and director of ebook development and innovation at Penguin Random House, ebook technology is making content more accessible for people with disabilities, optimizing books for mobile through responsive design, and supporting cleaner page formats. These developments are enabling PRH to create ebooks that are more than "just mirrors of print," says McCloy-Kelley, and she expects even further innovation in the next few years.
We hear a lot of stories here about how this or that ebook is going to fundamentally change the ebook. And to varying degrees these books do and don't tweak the paradigm, so we take such news with a grain of salt.
But when Mark Z. Danielewski reinvents the ebook, we take notice. On Slate's Future Tense blog, Kim O'Connor reports that the author's new The Fifty Year Sword is "a key project in [Pantheon's] strategic development plan and a category changer in the realm of digitized adult fiction."
Color us intrigued.
—Brian Howard
The Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a leading U.S.-based trade association representing the entire book supply chain, announced today the publication of a new Policy Statement endorsing EPUB 3 as the accepted and preferred standard for representing, packaging, and encoding structured and semantically enhanced Web content — including XHTML, CSS, SVG, images, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file format. BISG member companies, and other industry stakeholders, can visit http://www.bisg.org/what-we-do-4-155-pol-1201-endorsement-of-epub-3.php to download a copy.
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