Trial Offer to small and intermediate publishers: one free conversion to ePub

(To my digital publishing friends and acquaintances: feel free to
forward this to other forums where small and independent publishers
hang out...)


Everyone,

I am offering to a select number of small- to medium-size publishers
one free conversion of a book into high-quality ePub.


Why am I offering this?
-----------------------

Simple. I am making this limited offer to test the waters, work out
the workflow bugs, and get publisher feedback, of a commercial service
to small and medium-sized publishers to produce high-quality,
hand-mastered ePub publications.


Why have me do it rather than using some auto-conversion tool?
--------------------------------------------------------------

Three reasons.

First, I have observed that many smaller publishers choose to use Word
as their mastering format. While Word may be useful in the earliest
stages of authoring the content, it often makes for a poor master from
which all the various digital formats are derived. ePub produced from
Word using auto-conversion tools is often bloated and slow, oftentimes
with typographical formatting errors, and does not take full advantage
of all the features offered in ePub.

In my own publishing work, I find that a pure structural/semantic
XHTML (using standardized classes) is a superior mastering format from
which other digital formats (and print via importation of the XHTML
into Word or InDesign with subsequent hand-tweaking) yields better,
more consistent results. XHTML 1.1 is the input format into ePub. It
is also very easy to transform properly-marked-up XHTML 1.1 into other
XML-based digital publishing markup vocabularies such as DocBook,
Digital Talking Book, BookX (under development), and others.

Second, I am an authority on the ePub format and XML in publishing,
being a long-time technical contributor (since 1999) to the IDPF
specifications which underlie the ePub format. Not only do I know the
ePub-related specifications inside and out, I know the "why" behind
the specs. In addition, I am a long-time ebook publisher (since 1994)
so I understand the special needs of smaller publishers. My bio:

   http://www.jonnoring.net/Jon_Noring_bio.html

Third, as part of my conversion, I am a stickler on:

   1) white space normalization,

   2) spelling/punctuation/grammar/etc. checking (this copy editing is
      done under the direction of the publisher of course),

   3) using typographic characters (e.g. "curly" quotes and
      apostrophes, real em- and en-dashes, ellipses, accented
      characters, etc.),

   4) uniform character encoding (I use only UTF-8/ASCII),

   5) consistent, human-readable markup (so it is trivially editable
      using a text editor like Notepad),

   6) high quality CSS for optimal presentation (I will work with the
      publisher to customize the CSS), and

   7) complete, high-quality NCX table of contents.

   among other things...

Several publishers I've worked with in the past have been very happy
with the quality of my conversion work.


Restrictions
------------

I will do only one book for free per publisher, for no more than four
or five publishers (so hurry!). This offer is not unlimited though:
the books need to be uncomplicated, such as typical-length fiction
works with no illustrations other than a cover image (I can do complex
books, with lots of illustrations and even video, verse and other
non-plain paragraph constructs, embedded fonts, etc., but such books
take a lot more work.) So don't be nonplussed if I respectfully
decline to convert your book as part of this free offer -- but don't
hesitate to ask!

I prefer to start with a plain-text/Word/RTF/OpenOffice document, but
I will consider PDF sources if the text can be reliably extracted
without losing paragraph and text emphasis information (you have no
idea how many Word/PDF documents are so malformed that getting
accurate paragraph demarcations is not possible -- e.g. line breaks
occurring within a paragraph is a killer.) I will not start with a
paper source as this requires a lot of work to get from the ink-on-
paper to a highly-proofed digital text ready for markup.


Let me know if you are interested in my no-obligation free offer --
and my conversion services. The date of this post is 07 October 2009,
so note that this offer may go fast!

Jon Noring

[email protected]
801-230-8881




------------------------------------

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