Thinking about DRM for protecting your ebooks?
I recently received a question from a small publisher about DRM. He asked, “From what I have gathered there is no way of locking a physical CD or DVD effectively to one end user. If I send a book out over the net, like the physical DVD/CD, I need it to … More
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17 October 2012
Posted in Blog
Tagged Adobe, Amazon, copy protection, DRM, ebooks
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Building a basic website
We make websites. Sometimes, technical people like us make that sound simple, and sometimes we explain that it really isn’t. Setting up a basic website is one of those things that’s simple if you know how, but it takes years to learn the nitty gritty, and to be able to … More
A new site design
I’m an inveterate tinkerer, so our in-house projects are all really experiments. Our new site design and structure is another one. It is an attempt to focus in a way we’ve never done before. In building it, I was absolutely strict about our constraints. I wanted: one site design that … More
Moxyland and embedded audio
In the next few months, the IDPF will finalise and publish the EPUB 3 standard, the latest generation of specifications for the leading ebook file format. Geekier book people think about it a lot. For the less geeky, it means ebooks will get more bells and whistles, because everyone is … More
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8 July 2011
Posted in Blog, Our work
Tagged audio, ebook, EPUB 3, Lauren Beukes, Moxyland
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Being Different Together
I really enjoyed working on this project. First of all, friend and editor extraordinaire Nicola Rijsdijk managed the editing process, which was a huge undertaking. By the time the text arrived for me to work with, it was clean and straightforward. Second, the client – Intercultural and Diversity Studies at … More
Repackaging old editions
Moving office recently, we unearthed a bunch of old files. Among these, a project for author Hamilton Wende (aka Tony). Tony was working on his third book, The King’s Shilling, which would later be published by Jacana. His previous two books, True North and Deadlines from the Edge, were no longer … More
Digital textbooks may be cheaper, but how?
On my personal blog I’ve just written about an issue many students, lecturers, librarians and educational publishers are thinking about: if there are supposed to be cost savings in digital publishing, where are they? Companies that are not traditional publishers, and therefore have no paper-based business interests (read: jobs) to … More
Academic cover design
We do a lot of work for scholarly publishers, partly a result of my background in this industry. Cover designs for these can be tough. Here are a few examples (click to enlarge). The African Journal of Rhetoric was produced by my colleague Silma Parker, and I did the … More
Epubs and XML, what to remember
A recent white paper on digital publishing from Aptara makes some excellent points about digital publishing. I’ve expanded on some of these over on my personal blog. In particular, I’m addressing the relationship between what publishers are doing with ebooks now and their long-term interests in XML workflows: By creating … More
Tiny book, big name
This has to be the most fun I’ve had making a book ever: The Adventures of the Very Brave and Particular Nose. Bestselling crime novelist Margie Orford asked us to make this tiny children’s book to raise money for the Shine Centre. The Shine Centre pairs children who struggle with … More
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30 September 2008
Posted in Blog, Our work, Praise for EBW
Tagged Children's books, Margie Orford
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