We still remember the little thrill of the first web page we ever built, and seeing it load in a browser. Sure enough, a “dot e-pub" file appeared in the target directory. A cover page design tool let us create a cover without fuss, and we hit the compile button. After adding some simple heading styling to the chapter and section names, we could automatically generate a table of contents for the work. This fanciful concoction was to be our very first e-book. We took a few pages we had written for a journal and dropped them into Jutoh, along with some pictures from a family holiday. Even Apple, with its predilection for proprietary systems, has adopted e-pub as the basis for its iBooks. More importantly, it can simply be exported to the open standard e-pub format that any self-respecting e-reader can deal with. Of course you can choose the type face, font size, bulleting and numbering of your opus, and insert pictures. Using basic paragraph styles, a mass of text can be given structure and readability. It’s a simple word processor where you can import text files in slabs or type them from scratch. There’s a slightly rugged interface requiring a little patience. But Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad are giving the term sharper meaning, and Jutoh can rapidly publish to either of them. After all, what can the expression mean but a text that can be read in soft copy? An e-book could be presented in Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat or Apple’s Pages. There are various software formats that legitimately claim to be electronic books. We needed a new HotDog, an e-book for dummies solution. Suffice to say that few of us in business will ever do that. Just as pre-HotDog web authors were faced with learning the arcane codes of HTML, e-books are easy if you can master XML. Publishing for Kindle, iPad and other e-readers is simple in principle and devilishly difficult in practice. If it wasn’t for Jutoh, we’d still be in the dark. So we hit the Google trail in search of e-book enlightenment. Like the thousands who bought HotDog so they could get on board the web revolution, the idea of a major new publishing platform that we can’t participate in irked us. That’s why we had to discover how to create an e-book. Just as the worldwide web was once so obviously the future of mass communication, e -books are read by a tiny proportion of the populace, limited in availability but inevitably the way most books will be read when our beloved Damian, aged six, reaches his final year at school. The significance of e-books is not in current sales numbers but in the irresistible power of the medium. A milestone of some sort, to be sure, but not a tipping point in the overall history of publishing. It’s a bit like saying that chess books have drawn level with theology texts. Amazon keeps its cards close to its chest when it comes to absolute numbers but it’s hard to believe that hardbacks are a major part of its aggregate book sales. This week we’ve been exploring Jutoh, admittedly primitive, but which opens up the world of electronic book publishing to ordinary people like us.Ī’s announcement that Kindle e-books now outsell hard covers on its web store overstates the reality of today’s e -publishing industry. It was one of the first tools that allowed a mere mortal to write a web page. Back in the ’90s, an outfit called Sausage Software made a gazillion or three selling a primitive program called HotDog.
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