Book Designers Launch Twitter Discussion: #ePrdctn

By Colleen Cunningham, Senior Book Designer, Adams Media

Workflows in production departments are already complex and tightly scheduled. Adding the production of digital publications increases that complexity greatly, especially as documents must be prepared in a number of formats and for a variety of reading devices.

Being able to discuss these issues with colleagues from a variety of publishers can offer invaluable insights, but the opportunity to do so is often limited to networking at expensive conferences and those fortunate enough to be able to attend them.

Twitter has become a great platform for these types of discussions, though, enabling a broad group of participants to come together via a unique hashtag and organize an ongoing dialogue, eg: Laura Dawson‘s weekly #ISBNhour discussion (every Friday @ Noon EST).

The goal of the new #ePrdctn hashtag is to discuss practical design and production of digital publications, focusing on workflows (especially where print production is carried on simultaneously), tools, standards and formats, metadata, costs, and other issues facing in-house production departments and free-lancers doing production work for publishers. We’ll also be looking at coordination of the production department’s new workflows with editorial, sales, marketing, and management.

Of course, anyone producing digital publications is welcome to follow along and join in.

The topic for our first session on Wednesday, May 5th will be how the order of the parts of digital publications should differ from their order in a printed publication. Also on the list are best practices for handling graphics, cover images, and thumbnails in ePub format, and the advantages of and procedures for having books published on the iPad as applications.

The first #ePrdctn hour will be on Wednesday, May 5th, and it will run from 8-9am PDST (11am-Noon EDST), so our European colleagues can join in the discussion. It will be coordinated by Lindsey Thomas Martin; please mention suggestions for future topics to @crych.

NOTE: We will skip May 12th so as not to conflict with InDesign Secrets Live! and Digital Book World’s next eBook 201 WEBcast; sessions will resume Wednesday, May 19th@ 11am EDST.

Colleen Cunningham is the Senior Book Designer for Adams Media, a division of F+W Media.