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by Greg Albers

If you insist on publishing with Adobe DPS or iBooks Author …

February 22, 2013 in Digital Publishing Platforms by Greg Albers

I continue to be critical of Adobe DPS and iBooks Author as routes to digital publishing, but I readily acknowledge their utility for, and growing popularity among, artists and visual art publishers. Even as little as six months ago, there were so few of these things out that you could get attention for your digital publication simply for having done it. The novelty of the format was a story in itself. No longer. There are now enough being done that these e-books are going back to being judged for what they are—books. Books that, just like their print counterparts, must capture interest and engage their readers on the merits of their content and design. Unfortunately, many of the Adobe DPS and iBooks Author publications I’ve been asked to look at don’t do this, but I think I can offer a few tips. I hope you’ll find them useful.

  • Don’t add in fancy multimedia features just because you can. Make sure they make sense for what you’re trying to say.
  • Avoid giving written directions on what a reader should do, or how they should read. This is often a result of having too many different multimedia features (see above note), or odd navigation structures (see below note), but there are also some design things that can be done to prompt a reader’s action without sentence after sentence of written instruction. More than page layout design, consider digital publishing an exercise in user experience design (UX). Read up on this.
  • Consider limiting the scope of the content in order to make a more immersive and cohesive reading experience. It’s much easier to get lost in a digital book (not lost as in immersed, but lost as in misguided), especially with navigation systems like the ones Adobe DPS and iBooks Author provides. Allow for this by making sure that each random path through the book feels like a satisfying one. 
  • Avoid page layouts, think about screen layouts instead. The longer vertically scrolling sections of an Adobe DPS book, and to a lesser extent the horizontal sections of iBooks Author, are essentially created with individual pages stitched together, but that doesn’t mean each section should be in a page-like layout, they need to flow.
  • Remember that publishing with these tools limits your audience to owners of essentially a single device, beautiful though that device is. How will you share it with others? Consider making a secondary version to give your book/app a life and purpose beyond the one screen. Perhaps a web version, even if only with limited functionality, or a PDF version for that matter. 

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Avatar of Liz Neely

by Liz Neely

Webinar: ePublishing – What You Need To Know

January 30, 2013 in Digital Publishing Platforms, Digital Strategy by Liz Neely

We’ve got a great line-up for next week’s online MCN Pro Workshop: ePublishing – What You Need To Know. Stephen Hoban is the Associate Director for Publishing at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY. In consultation with multiple museum departments, Stephen has overseen the Guggenheim’s initiatives into digital publishing, launching the first exhibition catalogue e-book for Maurizio Cattelan: All in 2011. Tina Henderson is a freelance designer/production artist of books, ebooks, and book apps. She writes about tips and eProduction trends for her blog, on twitter and has even contributed to the Bliki.

We’re going to cover a lot of ground in this 2 ½ hour workshop—museum publishing strategy, the vocabulary of ePublication, a detailed rundown of the popular formats and authoring environments such as iBooks Author and Adobe DPS, distribution strategy, and trends to watch.

Join us!

MCN Pro Workshop 2: What You Need To Know Workshop

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

11:30 am to 2:00 pm EST

http://mcnpro.org/sessions/workshop-2-epublishing-what-you-need-to-know/

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Avatar of Tina Henderson

by Tina Henderson

Practical Matters: Digital Publishing Tools for Art Book Publishers

October 4, 2012 in Digital Publishing Platforms, Digital Strategy by Tina Henderson

With the increasing popularity of ebooks and the proliferation of ereaders and tablets, it has become routine to say that the past few years have been disruptive to the publishing industry. Though many publishers have been hesitant to jump into “the digital space,” art book publishers and museum publication departments have been among the slowest to embrace ebooks and digital publications.

Many digital formats cannot meet the high design and production standards for which art books are known. The most common forms of digital books are reflowable epub (viewable on Nook, iBooks, Sony, Kobo, and others) and Kindle format (mobi/KF8). Usually viewed on small, sometimes grayscale, screens, these formats do not allow the designer much control over basic specifications such as font choice, text size, and layout. In addition, images must often be scaled down due to file size limitations and the restricted screen sizes.

On the other hand, epub and Kindle formats have undeniable benefits for both publishers and consumers. They are relatively inexpensive to produce and distribute, and readers appreciate that they can search, highlight, and comment on the text, as well as adjust the text size to their individual specifications. Epub has gained wide acceptance by publishers and distributors, and Kindle format is the only digital format that can be viewed on Amazon’s highly popular Kindle.

An epub viewed on the iPad (top) and Nook Color (bottom center) and, after conversion to mobi, on Kindle Fire (left) and Kindle Keyboard (right).

Despite the many benefits of epub/Kindle, art book publishers are understandably reluctant to relinquish so much control over the design and layout of their publications. So, what are some other options for creating digital publications?

One option is fixed layout (fixed-layout epub or KF8 fixed layout). This print replica format benefits the publisher by providing greater control over layout, and the ability to define fonts and precisely position text. The text is live and can be magnified in a pop-up in the KF8 format. The downsides are that the text generally cannot be resized by the reader and, since these ebooks are typically viewed on small screens, they often require excessive zooming in order to read the text. Fixed layout production can be difficult, and requires hand-coding and taking precise measurements to position text. This format seems best suited for comics, children’s books, or photo books, in which each screen contains more image than text.

Another option is the book app. Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite (DPS), Aquafadas, Mag+, and other systems allow designers to repurpose InDesign print layouts, add a great deal of interactivity, and produce apps for the iPad (and in some cases, iPhone, Android tablets and phones, and Kindle Fire). The advantages of the app include complete control over the layout, the ability to use same fonts and art as with print, and the option to produce both horizontal and vertical layouts. The downsides include discoverability problems in the app store, text that usually cannot be searched or resized by the reader, and incompatibility with ereaders (Kindle, Nook, etc.). Perhaps the biggest negative is that Apple has been known to reject apps that contain no more functionality than an epub (which can contain audio and video, though not all ereaders will play them). It’s sobering to consider how much time and money could go into the creation of an app that may eventually have to be discarded. (See Greg Albers’ “Sitting in Pictures of Chairs” for more on Adobe’s DPS.)

Screenshots from a DPS app that uses both horizontal and vertical orientation.

A third option, something of a hybrid between the reflowable epub and the book app, is the Multi-Touch iBooks format created with iBooks Author. iBooks Author is a free WYSIWYG layout tool based on Apple’s Pages software. Originally created for the production of textbooks, it has also been used to produce digital cookbooks, travel books, and occasionally art books. Multi-Touch iBooks can only be sold and viewed via the iBooks app on the iPad. However, if an iBook is offered for free, it can also be distributed from a website. (Here is one example available directly from the publisher.) While only being available on the iPad limits the distribution of the publication, the retina display on the newest iPads provides a resolution superiority that cannot be matched by ereaders.

iBooks Author is clearly in its infancy. The software is sluggish and does not provide the amount of control that InDesign allows (for example, hyphenation can be turned on or off, but there are no other hyphenation controls). The interface is clunky and all elements are pre-styled, though adjustable. InDesign layouts cannot be repurposed for Multi-Touch iBooks, and font choice is limited to those that are available on the iPad. However, these iBooks have one key advantage over other digital formats: the automatically created portrait orientation, which is ideal for intensive reading.

Screenshots showing the landscape (left) and portrait (right) orientations of the Multi-Touch iBook, AFRICAN COSMOS, which is expected to be available for free in the iBookstore by mid-October.

iBooks Author contains editable templates which a designer can use to create a landscape-oriented layout. Text can be dragged in, pasted in, or imported from Word. Images can be dragged onto pages and precisely positioned. Additionally, interactive widgets are available for importing audio, video, slideshows, 3D images, and more. While the designer creates the landscape layout (which will be fixed, like an app), iBooks Author automatically creates a corresponding portrait orientation. This portrait orientation relies on the text styling of the landscape orientation but is a long, scrolling page with figures shown at thumbnail size in the left margin. Tapping a figure brings up a full-screen image that can be viewed with or without overlaying figure number, title, and caption. The reader can adjust the text size, search, highlight, make notes, and use the dictionary or glossary.

The designer has the option to turn off the portrait orientation, and many Multi-Touch iBooks do not take advantage of it, but the dual-layout nature of these iBooks makes the format an interesting option for art books. Apple highlights Multi-Touch iBooks in the iBookstore and appears to be pushing the format. If the iBooks Author software continues to improve and gives designers more control, this digital format could prove to be the best choice for art books, as long as the iPad is the target.

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Avatar of Greg Albers

by Greg Albers

Sitting in Pictures of Chairs: Digital Reading and Adobe

July 10, 2012 in Digital Publishing Platforms, Digital Strategy by Greg Albers

After a trial issue last month, Frieze magazine will now be available on iPad through Apple’s Newsstand. I’m very excited. Frieze has long been one of my favorite art magazines, it’s smart and engaging without pretense or preachiness. They also tend to have great literature and art publishing coverage, including their terrific Ideal Syllabus series. However, since I moved a few years ago to Tucson, Arizona (thousands of miles and worlds away from the magazine’s London offices) Frieze has been difficult to get in a timely manner. The magazine does offer full article access on the web with the purchase of a print subscription, but frankly, I have enough to read online already, and really craved Frieze‘s magazine-ness. So, yay, digital edition for my iPad!

The digital release of Frieze also coincides with a moment in art publishing where I think we’re finally seeing enough visual art e-books and e-book apps that we can begin to analyze them more broadly rather than simply as isolated case studies. We can start to see trends and directions, common high and low points, and common tools. The Frieze digital edition was created with Adobe’s popular Digital Publishing Suite (Adobe DPS). Adobe DPS is a fairly straightforward way of working with InDesign publication files (for example, those you used to create your print publication) to create a tablet-ready app or digital publication. Though you may not have been aware of it, you’ve almost surely come across a number of Adobe DPS apps already, including the Met’s early Korean Buncheong Ceramics, Dallas Art Museum’s new George Grosz in Dallas, and now Frieze.

Adobe DPS is proving a popular, early option for visual art publishers. So, I believe it’s worth taking some extra time to look at here. However, rather than an account of the publishing experience with Adobe DPS, I’d like instead to offer thoughts on the reading experience. This is how I came to Frieze anyway, as a reader, and I think it’s a valuable perspective. In fact, I’d propose that the reader and their experience should always be our primary focus as publishers. That may sound obvious, but I think maybe we forget it too often. In terms of our discussion here on digital publishing in art museums, when considering our many digital publishing options—the tools, the formats, the devices—we need to first ask, What is the final product like to read? Only when and if we find a positive answer to that question (meaning, a positive reading experience), should we ask, What is it like to publish?

  

So, what is it like to read the Frieze digital edition, and by extension other similar Adobe DPS-created apps? Not too shabby.

  • Lovely navigation. Includes a horizontal, visual table of contents (pictured above right) that allows the reader to quickly and easily see the scope of the publication, lengths of individual articles or chapters, where and what the illustrations are, etcetera. A digital thumbing of the pages.
  • Beautifully structured pages. Each article or chapter is read scrolling vertically and with the extensive layout controls available, allows for some lovely, poetic design moments.
  • Ads! Yes, I’m listing ads as a positive. Why? Because ads have become a primary content tool for tracking what’s going on in contemporary art; because their presence lends to the digital edition’s aforementioned “magazine-ness”; and because, clever Frieze, some of them take advantage of the digital space and are animated or include extra frames of images.
  • Clean multimedia add-ins for video, audio, slideshows, and animations.
  • An app format that feels reassuringly familiar as more and more publishers use it for their various publications.

Some significant high points, and these, taken into account with what I believe is a fairly easy workflow for publishers looking to get into app/digital publishing, makes Adobe DPS an attractive option. There are a couple of things that I think need to be done to improve the reading experience:

IDEA 1:
Optimize your files for the smallest possible download size, and test and re-test the download experience.

This issue of Frieze was nearly 600MB and took me more than an hour to load wirelessly on a network that was otherwise speedy. Also, within the Newsstand app, where Frieze resides, I was unable to leave the app as the issue downloaded, or to let the iPad go to sleep without it resetting the download to 0 and starting from the beginning. In the end, I had to turn off the sleep/autolock feature on the iPad and then sit it there for an hour, unmoving, while the thing loaded. If this isn’t something that can be avoided in the creation of the app within Adobe DPS, then it needs to be addressed for the reader before they buy. Set expectations so they can be met.

On a side note, since first downloading the issue, I’ve gotten a notification that there’s an update ready to install, but I’ve been afraid to try it. Especially as it doesn’t give me an indication of what the update covers, or how long it will take me to download.

IDEA 2:
Unlock your content!

As a publisher, I understand the desire for a beautifully designed page. I understand (though don’t prescribe to) wanting to protect content from those who might misuse it and hurt my bottom line. And I understand that these desires lead to things like Adobe DPS apps that give the publisher complete design control, and copyright protection. As I reader, I don’t understand at all.

As I mentioned before, I love Frieze. And in this issue, as always, there were several articles I would have loved to take notes on, highlight key quotes from, and tell people about over my Twitter feed, but I couldn’t, the app wouldn’t allow it. In the Frieze digital edition, as well in the other Adobe DPS apps I mentioned above, there is no way for you to interact with the text as a reader. You can’t highlight it. Can’t annotate it. Can’t share a snippet of it, or even copy a section for your own notes. I’ve written before in defense of what I call ”agile reading”, and I’m afraid this is anything but. In these Adobe DPS created apps, no matter how much you poke or prod, the text remains mute and unmoved. It reminds me of Joseph Kosuth’s seminal conceptual work, One and Three Chairs, because doing anything beyond simply reading the text in these apps is like trying to sit in a picture of a chair.

One and Three Chairs, Joseph Kosuth, 1965. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Joseph Kosuth. This iconic piece consists of a chair, a picture of the chair, and the word “chair” and its definition.

And here, it occurs to me that unlocking content is not simply about giving people access to the text, it is also about embracing the physical experience of reading. Think about those many museum exhibitions you’ve seen that include books in glass vitrines. As book and museum lovers you must get as frustrated by these things as I do. Encased in glass, static, and mute, these poor things have lost everything that makes them books. Books, we know, must be read. Books must be paged through. Books must be handled. Indeed they are made for hands, and the resulting interaction of hand, eye, and book, are, I believe, an intrinsic part of the book’s cultural and pedagogical power. What we might not have considered until now is that reading a digital book is a physical experience too. Swiping pages, pinching in and out on images, pressing links, double tapping and running your finger over a sentence, word-by-word to highlight it. These are the meaningful, physical gestures of e-reading, and if you start to remove them, you’re removing the book’s utility, and in turn I would argue, its chances for intellectual relevance and longevity.

Think of the most enduring, culturally and intellectually important books that have ever been published, and think about how people interact with them. It starts with the individual reader marking passages and making notes, then they share these things with those around them, they discuss and argue over them, quote and cite them, and eventually write more about them. Readers’ interactions with those books are what have made them great. I applaud Frieze for taking this digital step, just as I applaud the Met and Dallas and everyone else working hard to bring beautiful and meaningful art publishing to the digital space. But let us be cautious about that step when it inhibits our readers’ ability to interact with our texts.

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