Planet Quark

Guide to Fixed Layout ePubs

A “Fixed Layout” e-book is probably the dumbest of all e-book formats. It’s essentially a copy of an existing book’s layout, and requires the reader to pinch and pan to TRY to read it. Still, some books are OK in that format — photo books, some children’s books, some illustrated textbooks, and some cookbooks. To [...]

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What Designers Need to Know About People

Get an inside scoop on the psychological impact of your designs by reading, 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People by Susan M. Weinschenk. Learn how fonts and imagery affect trust, discover how to grab attention and for how long you can expect to hold it, learn how and why people filter information, and [...]

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EPUB 3 Best Practices

EPUB 3 Best Practices, by Matt Garrish, guides you through the most advanced features of EPUB 3 for digital books. For example: global language support; embedded multimedia; scripted and interactive content; advanced metadata; and fixed and adaptive layouts. 372 pages, $30 printed or $14 digital, from O’Reilly.

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Better eBook Typography

Author Chris Jennings’ eBook Typography ($6.99 at Apple’s iBookstore) sets out to help designers have better control over the typography in electronic books. Since most of the changes and enhancements will need to be made in your ePub’s resulting CSS and HTML files instead of in your page layout program, Jennings gives us how-to tips [...]

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