Towards Commercial eBook Production in Small Publishing Houses

Eduardo Rodríguez López, Ángeles Saavedra Places, José Antonio Cotelo Lema,

Oscar Pedreira Fernández and Nieves Rodríguez Brisaboa

Databases Laboratory, Computer Sciences Department, University of A Coruña, 15071 A Coruña, Spain

Keywords: Enhanced e-Books, ePub, e-Readers, Authoring Tools, Device-independent Contents.

Abstract: In this paper we present the rationale behind e|ditor, a tool for online edition of digital contents aimed to

small publishing houses. Its goal is to provide them with a user-friendly tool for creating (autonomously and

at a commercially viable cost) a wide variety of device-independent enhanced e-books, including

pocketbooks, pop-up e-books, school textbooks and extracurricular activities e-books.

E|ditor is content-centric, focused in the content creation process. The standard export formats currently

supported are EPUB (specially indicated for pocketbooks), SCORM (for LMSs) and HTML5 (for more

powerful contents, aiming specially to school textbooks). This provides publishing houses with an

appropriate spectrum of formats to cover a wide range of e-book types.

This paper describes the main requirements of e|ditor and the design decisions taken to guarantee platform-

independence and content reusability whereas providing a general purpose enhanced e-book creation tool.

1 INTRODUCTION

Traditional book publishing houses face nowadays

several challenges to their survival. The adaptation

to the current digital era, where contents are

increasingly consumed in digital form, is one (if not

the biggest) of them. The technological evolution of

e-readers and the already widespread use of smart-

phones and tablets are changing at a fast pace the

way users consume digital contents, and this is

producing drastic changes in the traditional

publishing markets.

The pocketbooks market has been suffering an

important shift from printed books to e-books, in the

same way as it has already happened to music

distribution from physical supports to

online/electronic support (e.g. iTunes or Spotify).

Publishing houses specialized in pop-up books

have found an strong competitor in digital content

producers, as online multimedia interactive contents

are more attractive to catch the child attention and

are easily placed right at home through Internet.

The school and educational book publishers are

also experiencing in the last years how their markets

move towards the use of new technologies. The

arrival of native-digital children (Prensky, 2001) to

the education systems and the pressure of public

educative administration initiatives, like the ones

fostered by the European Schoolnet (EUN)

(www.eun.org) or the UK Technology Enhanced

Learning Program (http://tel.ioe.ac.uk/), are forcing

them to provide learning contents also in digital

form, and to fully design those taking into account

all the possibilities of digital technologies. This

transition faces two main difficulties. The first is that

the educative community is still learning how

teaching resources, methodologies and relationships

should be better adapted to properly incorporate

digital technologies into the educative process

(Vrasidas and Glass, 2005) (Underwood, et al.,

2010) (Cachia, et al., 2010). The second is the maze

of continuously evolving content formats and device

platforms.

The launch of the Amazon online shop in the

nineties, the appearance of Amazon Kindle e-reader

in 2007 and the recent moves of the main device-

platform providers, taking advantage of their

dominant position to place their online shops (e.g.

Google Play or Apple iTunes) as the default source

of digital contents in their platforms, have made

evident to publishers the need to adapt their markets

to the distribution of digital contents before it

becomes too late.

The need to ensure that small publishing houses

succeed in adapting to this big market change is not

a matter of business diversity. It is a matter of

116

Rodríguez López E., Saavedra Places Á., Antonio Cotelo Lema J., Pedreira Fernández O. and Rodríguez Brisaboa N..

Towards Commercial eBook Production in Small Publishing Houses.

DOI: 10.5220/0004384201160121

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 116-121

ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

cultural diversity survival, as small publishing

houses are the ones more directly linked with

minority languages and cultures dissemination, and

with promoting independent thinking and points of

view (Carroll, 1985). But small publishing houses

have no power over the “digital ecosystem”, so they

have to ensure that their contents adapt to the

functionalities provided by the most common device

platforms, that their formats adapt to the ones

supported by their most common tools, and that their

distribution channels are easily accessible on them.

Moreover, they will have to adapt their tools and

their existing contents to future changes on all those

platforms. But small publishing houses suffer the

lack of tools adapted to this new scenery. Big

publishing houses have resources to develop self-

tailored tools for that purpose, but small publishing

houses have not.

In this article we introduce e|ditor, a platform

designed to provide publishing houses with a tool to

produce format-independent and device-independent

contents. It has been developed in collaboration with

small publishing houses whose markets range from

school and educational books, to pop-up books and

pocketbooks. We describe the requirements

identified and the approaches followed to face them,

as well as the rationale behind those decisions. We

also give a general view of the resulting platform.

2 BACKGROUND

Although there are tools available to create digital

contents, small publishers suffer the lack of tools

supporting the full creation process and aiming to a

wide range of book types.

Almost all the tools available for pocketbook

creation are meant for converting existing digital

contents to EPUB, an open e-book standard format

designed for reflowable content that makes use of

XHTML and CSS and is extensively supported by

current e-reader devices and software. One example

is the open source tool Calibre (Goyal, 2006), which

allows the conversion of a wide range of document

formats to the main e-book formats (EPUB, MOBI,

pdb, etc.). But just translating conventional contents

to EPUB is not the best way to take full advantage of

digital contents. SIGIL (Markovic, 2009) is one of

the few that supports e-book creation and can export

them to EPUB. But this desktop application is

designed only for pocketbook creation, does not

allow interactive content and has no support for

content reuse or collaborative edition.

Last versions of Adobe InDesign and

QuarkXPress support exporting to e-book formats.

But they do not create enhanced e-books. Instead,

they just convert plain paper books to plain e-books.

Apple offers iBooks Author for e-books creation,

but it is provided only to sell them through iTunes

Store, and cannot be exported outside it.

EXeLearning (Univ. of Auckland et al., 2006) is

an open source authoring application to assist

teachers in web content publishing. It is a desktop

application and allows exporting to SCORM format

and to self-contained XHTML web pages.

With regard to tools for creating digital educative

contents, the efforts from educative administrations

have led to the creation of tools like Cuadernia,

Constructor, JClick, Hot Potatoes or Ardora.

Cuadernia (Junta de Castilla la Mancha, 2008) and

Constructor (Junta de Extremadura, 2005) allow the

creation of several types of interactive activities and

their packaging following SCORM (a collection of

XML based standards used in web based e-learning).

JClick (Generalitat de Catalunya, 1992) provides a

set of computer applications to develop different

types of educational activities like puzzles,

associations, text exercises or crosswords.

Hot Potatoes (University of Victoria, 1998) is a suite

of six applications to create interactive jumbled-

sentence, crossword, short-answer, multiple-choice,

gap-fill and matching/ordering exercises. It can

export to SCORM format or as HTML.

Ardora (Bouzán Matanza, 2008) is an interactive

exercises creator. Its contents use HTML5, CSS3

and JavaScript, and can be exported to SCORM.

None of these applications support collaborative

work or “book collections” (where the book design

is common and uniform through the entire e-book

collection). All of them are meant for independent

authors that want to create a specific type of e-book

content and rarely (only SIGIL) support all the e-

book process. They are usually format-centric

designed, more centred in translating contents to a

specific format than in the content design. They are

neither meant for content reuse nor to ease future

content republishing in new formats or styles. They

are not web applications (centralizing the content

storage) and have to be deployed in the user PC,

what restricts the platforms that can be used for

edition (usually only Windows, Linux and Mac).

Even worst, only a few of them generate device

independent contents. Cuadernia and Constructor

create Flash contents, and JClick generates Java

Applets, limiting the platforms on which they can be

displayed. All these reasons make them unsuitable

for small publishing houses.

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3 GOALS

The e|ditor project focuses on the development of an

e-book editor for small publishing houses. The key

needs identified are:

• Full e-Book Creation Support. It must support

the whole e-book creation workflow, allow

mixing all types of contents and seamlessly

integrate them in the same e-book.

• Collaborative Edition. It must support

collaborative content creation, centralize e-book

resources, user management and maintenance,

and allow both deploying it internally at the

publisher IT infrastructure and providing it

externally as SaaS (Software as a Service).

• Support to “book collections”. It must support

the creation of book collections, with the same

formats and structures. This is typical of

textbooks, where the books for the different

subjects follow the same structure and aesthetic.

• Flexibility. It must allow using the appropriate

structures for the types of books produced by a

typical small publishing house.

• Content-centric. Contents must be stored using

a semantic/structured organization, not in any

final e-book format. This pursues two goals:

o Simplify content revision and reuse.

o Format independency. It makes easier to use

“write once, export many” approaches. This

will allow publishers to easily and cheaply

adapt their e-book catalogue to new formats.

• Platform Independency. e-Books must be

readable in as many platforms and devices as

possible. For this goal is crucial the intensive

use of official and de-facto standards.

• LMS Integration. Support for LMS integration

through the SCORM standard.

These goals have guided the design of e|ditor.

The following section describes its architecture and

the workflow supported by it.

4 ARCHITECTURE

E|ditor has been designed as a web application. This

allows its use either as SaaS, hosted by an IT

provider, or as an Intranet server application, hosted

by the publishing house. In this client-server

architecture the centralized server application is the

host and the user’s web browsers are the clients.

Access control is provided through user/password

identification. E|ditor is composed of four modules:

authentication, edition, layout specification and

export (see Figure 1). This keeps tasks independency

and allows assigning different task to different user.

Figure 1: E|ditor functional architecture.

All the data are stored in a database. They are

stored independently of its final layout and export

format, so that new layouts and export formats can

be used later with the same e-book content.

4.1 Edition Module

The edition module has three sub-modules:

catalogue, structure definition and content edition.

4.1.1 Catalogue

This sub-module handles the e-book metadata. It

follows the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set

(DCMES) (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, 1999),

endorsed by standards like ISO 15836:2009,

ANSI/NISO Z39.85-2007 or IETF RFC 5013.

4.1.2 Structure Definition

This sub-module predefines how the contents will be

organized in the e-book and the type of contents

valid at each level.

For example, in Figure 2 a text section is

declared, having three sub-elements: introduction,

subject and conclusions. Introduction can have only

textual content whereas subject and conclusions can

have both text and interactive exercises (Section 0

shows the supported types).

It is possible to clone the structure specification

to reuse it within an e-book collection.

This information is used by the edition module

(see Section 0) to keep a uniform structure within

the e-book and by the layout specification module

(see Section 0) to define the e-book layout.

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Figure 2: Structure specification.

Figure 3: Content editor.

4.1.3 Content Edition

This sub-module handles all the tasks related with e-

book content edition. It manages the e-book index

and the content editor.

Editors must define first the e-book index. For

each index element they set its content type. The e-

book structure definition is used at this point to

ensure that a valid content type is chosen. After an

index element is defined its content can be

introduced through the content editor. The content

types that can be associated to an index element are:

• Conceptual Content. The core textual content in

a book. This is usually the only content type in

pocketbooks, and is widely used in textbooks.

A WYSIWYM HTML editor is used that

annotates the content parts semantically. The

layout specification module uses this to format

them properly. For example, if we tag content

parts as poem, definition, highlighted note,

footnote or bibliography, specific styling and

layouts can be applied to each one.

• Interactive Exercises. Exercises to be made by

the users/students. The answers are corrected

automatically, giving them immediate feedback.

They are used in pop-up and school textbooks.

• Scenery. Sceneries are sections composed by

animated/interactive content. They are intended

to provide some light interactive animations,

mainly in pop-up books.

• Links. A links block is meant to present a

collection of hyperlinks, either to other parts of

the book or to external resources.

• Glossary. Intended to group a glossary of term

definitions. It can be used as an interactive

glossary, allowing users to look the definitions

right at the points where the terms are used.

Interactive exercises are used in school textbooks,

complementary activities and educative books. The

following types are supported by e|ditor:

• Multiple-choice Tests. Editors write one right

answer and three wrong. For each one, they can

write an explanation to be shown if that answer

is chosen. The answers are scrambled each time.

• True/false Questions. Editors write the question,

set the right answer and optionally add an

explanation to be shown once it is answered.

• Short answer questions. They can be answered

with a word or a well defined short text. Editors

write the question and up to three possible right

answers. The user answer must match exactly,

with no variations in uppercases or diacritical

signs. This is done to reinforce proper writing.

• Matching/ordering exercises. The typical

exercise where the user has to match pairs of

words/sentences or order a list of words.

• Crossword Puzzles. E|ditor allows loading

JCross files created with Hot Potatoes.

• Gap-fill Exercises. Editors write the full

exercise text, enclosing with # characters the

text to hide. The user must type the missing

text, which is corrected using exact text

comparison.

• Free-style Exercises. They allow writing other

types of exercises. Editors just write the

exercise, which is not automatically corrected.

4.2 Layout Specification

This module sets how each content type is translated

to an export format. This is directly linked with the

structure definition and dependent on the export

formats, as they impose limitations on how the

contents can be shown. Several layouts (for the same

or different export formats) can be defined for the

same e-book. E|ditor provides layouts adapted to

different export formats. They can be directly used

or be cloned and modified to create new layouts.

This is the only module intended for specialized

users, as layout edition requires CSS knowledge.

Once defined a layout, non-specialized users can use

it to visualize and export the book content.

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4.3 Export Formats

E|ditor achieves platform-independence by allowing

(re)exporting the e-books to several widely

supported formats. Currently these formats are:

• EPUB 2.0. The most widely supported format in

e-readers. It defines a file format (.epub) to store

the contents and the e-book metadata/catalogue.

Multimedia contents can not be exported to it.

This is the ideal format for pocketbooks.

• SCORM. A standard supported by most LMSs.

It provides protocols for feedback to the LMS, a

transfer file format and support for adapting

how users navigate through the contents. It is

especially appropriate for online education.

• Web (HTML5). Smart-phones, tablets and PCs

provide e-book viewers with different standards

support. But all of them are shipped with web

browsers with HTML5 support for multimedia

and interactive contents, scalable vector

graphics (SVG) and mathematical formulas.

Interactive whiteboards (IWB) are usually PC-

based and reproduce the same types of contents.

It is ideal for pop-up, school and educational e-

books, as it gives more room for interactivity.

5 E|DITOR WORKFLOW

The e-book creation sequence in e|ditor is basically

the following. First, the e-book structure is defined.

Then, the content index is added. Afterwards, the

editors write the contents. Later, additional resources

are added. Finally, the layouts for the different

export formats are defined. Then, the user can

choose a layout and export the e-book to the format

specified by it.

Anyway, e|ditor allows flexible workflows.

Users can define the structure and then change it

after writing some content. Layouts can be edited at

any moment. And users can define only some

portions of the book index, fill their content, and

then add new index parts. This allows publishers to

better adapt the workflow to their needs.

6 EVALUATION

E|ditor has been already in use by some of the small

publishing houses involved in the project.

Publisher Baía Edicións has used it to create its

student textbook for 2º and 4º grade social sciences

and the 2º grade social sciences teacher textbook,

available in web for those schools using them as

classroom textbooks. E|ditor helped to guarantee a

uniform structure both within a book and within the

book collection, and to reuse parts of the 2º grade

social sciences student book in the teacher version.

Figure 4: Baía Edicións, classroom textbook.

It took just 60 person-hours to create the 2º grade

social sciences student e-book using e|ditor. In

contrast, the student e-book for 1

grade social

sciences was created in an ad-hoc manner with the

support of some specifically developed tools, taking

more than 500 person-hours (tools development

apart) to do it. This illustrates the improvements in

autonomy and costs that e|ditor achieved.

Publisher Editorial Galaxia has used e|ditor to

create its first e-book catalogue, with 36 narrative e-

books in EPUB format. It also allowed them to reuse

contents to create demo-editions (with parts of the e-

books) for marketing purposes.

Figure 5: Editorial Galaxia, e-book catalogue.

Publisher Galebook, a small start-up specialized

in digital contents, is using e|ditor for creating their

extracurricular activities e-books and plans to use it

also for classic-tales pop-up e-books.

E|ditor is also used by ASPG, an association with

more than 1,000 affiliates and more than 30 years

promoting educative and pedagogical innovation,

teachers training and didactic contents publishing.

After years using EXeLearning, Hot Potatoes and

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similar tools for creating their didactic contents, it is

now using e|ditor for creating its extracurricular

educative e-books. It plans to give a course to its

affiliates in March 2013 on the use of e|ditor.

In all of these success cases, e|ditor has allowed

the creation of e-books by regular users, without the

need of specialized skills and at a small cost.

7 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper we present e|ditor, a platform to

provide small publishing houses with a tool to create

e-books at a commercially viable cost. It allows

them to create from pocketbooks to pop-up e-books,

textbooks and extracurricular activities e-books,

with special care in school textbooks. It allows them

to be autonomous in the e-book creation, without the

need of specialized IT personnel.

The feedback from the publishers that have been

using e|ditor shows that it makes them capable of

creating the different types of e-books that they

need, autonomously and within reduced budgets.

Although e|ditor addresses their digital content

creation needs, more steps are needed to develop a

solution to allow them to manage all the production,

distribution and publishing processes and fully adapt

their business to the publication and distribution of

digital contents.

First, they need to provide users with a very

intuitive and simple way to buy and consume digital

contents. Users just want to easily and immediately

find the right contents, buy them and consume them,

without headaches. The process must be very simple

and straightforward. To neglect this point would be a

huge mistake, as the main e-reader and mobile

devices platforms (Amazon Kindle, Google Android

and Apple Iphone/Ipad) are already putting all the

stress on it. They have the technological power (the

platform control), and to successfully compete with

them requires to make content access and

consumption as easy and direct as possible.

A second issue to address is the fact that digital

contents can be easily copied. Measures must be

taken to reduce the risk of income loses due to

piracy. This is a tricky point, because measures to

avoid piracy usually go against the “easy to buy and

consume” need. To find the right balance is crucial.

These challenges are not trivial, and successfully

addressing them requires the joint collaboration of

IT companies/researchers and small publishers to

carefully analyze and address them. We are

currently working in this stage in collaboration with

some small publishing houses, with the aim of

building the “integral solution” they need.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been partially supported by MICINN

(PGE and FEDER) grants TIN2009-14560-C03-02,

TIN2010-21246-C02-01 and CDTI CEN-20091048,

and Xunta de Galicia (FEDER) grants 2010/17, CN

2012/211 and IN841C 2011/94.

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