Building Digital Book World’s First Ebook
The Inside Perspective
by Deanna Utroske
DECEMBER 2012

Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing—Interviews With 19 Innovative Ebook Business Leaders is Digital Book World’s first ebook.

We already excel at publishing daily ebook business news and providing data, resources, and learning opportunities for the digital publishing community. Developing Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing gave us the chance to learn more about creating ebooks and to contribute to the digital future of publishing from the inside out.

That’s where I come in. As Digital Book World’s Content Producer, my role includes having assembled the content, work product, and deliverables for this ebook as well as liaising among the team that contributed. From that vantage point I’ve taken in the importance of learning by publishing, of judiciously choosing a content conversion strategy, of ebook innovations, and of digital cover design.

Learning by Doing

While we were developing Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing, DBW daily—our e-newsletter for the digital publishing community—ran these headlines: “Why You (Yes, You) Should Publish an Ebook” and “Is It Time to Publish Your Next Ebook?” These pieces were reminders that digital book publishing is a great way to share content and expertise.

Digital Book World thrives as a year-round news, thought-leadership and networking resource for publishing professionals and their allies. Ebooks, like Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing, open one more channel of communication with you.

But Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing is more than that. This ebook has enhanced our expertise from the inside. As is the case for all publishing industry professionals, technology providers, agents and affiliates, ebook publishing lets us learn by doing.

Conversion and Evolution

Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing began as digital content on WordPress. Accordingly, Ebook Developer India Amos recommended PressBooks for the early workflow of this project as it has an interface quite like WordPress and aims to make ebook creation as straightforward as blogging.

All things digital evolve constantly, and ebook creation services and strategies are no exception. PressBooks was a helpful first conversion tool in this case. Even so, to arrive at the final ebook you’re reading, India Amos “threw out their stylesheet and replaced pretty much every other scrap of code twice over, between RegEx and HTML Tidy.” It’s her particular formatting skills and sensibility that shaped Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing.

Our future workflow will look different than it did for this first ebook. And, it’s that sort of responsive, flexible innovation that grants everyone who produces and publishes ebooks the option to guide the evolution of digital publishing.

Don’t Wait, Innovate

Maja Thomas points out in her interview in this ebook that “publishers have been modest . . . in order to let the author take center stage. The problem with that philosophy is that nobody knows the hundreds of people that contribute to making a great book.”

Our solution? An ebook masthead!

In Should Editors Get Credited in Books?, a post on Digital Book World’s Expert Publishing Blog by the editor of this ebook Jeremy Greenfield, you can find five benefits that masthead-style credit affords editors and production teams.

Having thus acknowledged our Digital Book World team, we chose to also recognize some of our external allies. We offered knowledgeable industry sponsors essay space and in-book advertising. This opens an avenue for direct interaction between you (our ebook readers) and our larger Digital Book World community of publishing professionals.

We selected our in-book advertising and sponsored content with consideration for the shelf life of Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing. This content is an active resource for the near future and will, in time, evolve into a durable reference to this moment in publishing history.

Well Covered

Discoverability for any book relies, in part, on aesthetics. Looking to create an uncomplicated, scalable ebook cover for Finding the Future of Digital Book Publishing, we fashioned an image that reads well both in full color and in black and white.

Characterizing the swiftly changing ebook business, our cover depicts a future that necessarily has a retro-futuristic feel. Ben King’s design invites (prospective) readers to page ahead and find what the future of digital book publishing holds, thanks to the guidance of nineteen innovative ebook business leaders.

This inside perspective on the ebook publishing process taught me a lot, and I recommend publishing your own ebook. But if it’s only actionable insights and practical wisdom on the digital future of publishing that you’re after, I recommend that you page ahead and read what nineteen ebook business insiders advise.