ENTRIES TAGGED "design"

…and along with EPUB 3: New CSS!

Simplifying and eliminating competing visual distractions for the reader

Hopefully you all read Sanders Kleinfeld’s great writeup about O’Reilly’s move to EPUB 3, and the changes and challenges that brings. Along with updating our toolchain, we also revisited our EPUB design and took a stab at improving the user experience. While most of the updates aren’t necessarily very visually exciting or seemingly worth a lot of fanfare, I thought this would be a good opportunity to give some background into the reasoning behind the design choices I made, and some of the limitations we still face, even with the advent of EPUB 3.

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PDF is still “better”

Until eBooks are redesigned exclusively for the screen, print and PDF will continue to provide a better user experience

A few weeks ago, I surprised myself. I had decided to learn a new code language, and O’Reilly of course has a great little book about this particular language, so I pulled up the eBook files, and almost without thinking, I loaded the PDF onto my iPad, rather than the EPUB. And my brow furrowed as I tried to figure out why I had made that choice, because as an eBook developer—as a CSS and web technology devotee—shouldn’t I also be a devoted EPUB user?

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Reading experience and mobile design

The convergence is inevitable

It’s all about user experience. Once you get past whether a book is available on a particular reading platform, the experience is the distinguishing factor. How do you jump back to the table of contents? How do you navigate to the next chapter? How do you leave notes? How does it feel? Is it slick? Clunky? Satisfying? Difficult? Worth the money?

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What we could do with really big touchscreens

What we could do with really big touchscreens

Ten-inch tablets are just the start of the touchscreen publishing revolution.

If we could combine the touchscreen's ability to signal our layout wishes with the large displays and workspaces that many of us enjoy at our work desks, wouldn't that change the kinds of documents we create?

The making of a "minimum awesome product"

The making of a "minimum awesome product"

Flipboard's Evan Doll on design and the importance of being inherently social.

In this podcast, Evan Doll, the co-founder of Flipboard sat down with Joe Wikert to discuss Flipboard's focus on design and social integration.

At its best, digital design is choreography

At its best, digital design is choreography

Liza Daly on why digital design elements should move in concert.

In this brief interview, Threepress Consulting owner Liza Daly tackles a question about formatting content for browser publishing. She says for design to succeed, authors, artists and developers must work together.

If you're a content designer, the web browser will be your canvas

If you're a content designer, the web browser will be your canvas

Peter Brantley on designing and thinking browser first.

The Internet Archive's Peter Brantley discusses the influence of web browsers on content design and the challenges of complex media.

To page or to scroll?

To page or to scroll?

Digital book designers face a big question: Is it better to scroll or flip?

We all got comfortable scrolling through web pages a long time ago, but ereader and tablet design added a new quirk with the introduction of page flips. Here, Pete Meyers considers the applications of scrolling and flipping across reading environments.

Publishing News: Rebooting online news presentation

Publishing News: Rebooting online news presentation

Ben Huh has a fling with news, checking in on the Twitter archive, and readers can now fund authors directly.

In the latest Publishing News: Ben Huh dishes on news organizations moving in the right direction; one year later, the Library of Congress' Twitter Archive is still being built; and the Unbound.co.uk publishing platform launched with some big-name authors.

10 innovative digital books you should know about

10 innovative digital books you should know about

A look at 10 envelope-pushing digital books.

These days, Peter Meyers is knee-deep in digital books. Here he shares 10 of the best digital / interactive texts he's run across.