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‘Are eBooks ready for technical content?’
July 28, 2008 | 2:42 pm
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By David Rothman
I’ve got a warm spot in my heart for the Pragmatic Programmer site. It sells e-books using social DRM—a concept that has intrigued both Adobe’s Bill McCoy and me, as a compromise in the "protection" debate.
So I’ll pay special attention to a question that Dave Thomas over there is asking: Are eBooks ready for technical content? For easy layouts, such as those used in novels, of course E is ready. But how about program listings? Some houses like O’Reilly have been doing this for a long time. In the end I hope that the universal solution for tech books and others will be ePub, but for the moment which e-formats do you think work out best for tech books, and why? First check out Dave’s thoughts and his commenters’.
Related: The ePub torture test, a TeleBlog post, and comments from ePub skeptic Daniel Udsen and ePub advocate Hadrien, who says ePub is "the perfect system" for image-heavy files and that "the problem is on the reading system side."W
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Comments:
The epub format supports SVG, which can be used to do a lot. We are currently working at Hindawi on our XML/epub workflow in order to start publishing books as well as journal articles using epub. Both the books and articles will be highly technical in nature and I can say that we are happy with how epub works for us.
I have uploaded a few samples at http://www.hindawi.com/epub.html for those who might want to look at them. The second sample titled “On Optimal Bit…” is a short article with lots of mathematical content. The first and the third samples are whole books with mathematical and tabular content in the first and many diagrams in the second. epub is more versatile than what a causal content creator might be inclined to think, but you need to create a proper XML coding and production standard to utilize its full potential.