Vook has posted a white paper called "Ebook Errors: How to Avoid 5 Common Problems," highlighting common formatting errors that frequently pop up for publishers when transferring their titles to digital. The white paper features Elizabeth Castro, author of EPUB: Straight to the Point, Pablo Defendini from Open Road, and Kassia Krozser from Booksquare.
The focus of the report was a solution list for five common problems in e-book formatting. The problems were: Headers with Hyphens; Chapter titles, Headers, and Sub-Headers Separated on Different eBook Pages; Unsightly Indentation, and Random Blank Pages in the eBook; Strange Characters Inserted into eBooks; eBook Aesthetics.
For example, the report states that the problem of sloppy indentation and blank pages are often caused when converting EPUBs from Microsoft Word. Many users of Word use "Tab" to indent paragraphs and "Enter" to insert line breaks, rather than using Word's formatting styles. The solution: if hand-coding an e-book, one should apply styles to the document (in Word or InDesign) before converting the file to EPUB.
The report also outlined the various contributing factors that lead to errors, which Defendini said would persist as long as e-books "remain second class citizens in the production workflow," meaning that print worklfow still dictates e-book workflow. Krozser expects to see changes in workflows on an imprint-by-imprint basis, "particularly those where e-book sales are approaching 50% of revenues." On a more general level, both Defendini and Krozser agreed that creating a single XML file at the outset of production would address many of the e-book errors currently plaguing publishers.
Vook's white paper can be read here: http://thanks.vook.com/errors/.
