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Practical epub workshop series

This is a series of four evening sessions over four weeks. It's for people already working regularly with books for publication, especially designers, typesetters and production managers. Content editors will also find it valuable, especially if their work involves working with ebooks.

The aim is for each participant to make a valid epub good enough to sell by the end of the series. The sessions will cover:

  • An introduction: Epub and publishers, retailers, devices, distributors and technologies
  • Preparing content for epub creation
  • Creating the epub (and checking it)
  • Refining the epub (making it look great)

This is nitty-gritty training that will enable production staff to create, check, and fix epub files, and fully understand their inner workings. It will also enable designers and typesetters to offer their clients a solid epub-creation service.

Participants must bring a laptop (with certain free applications installed in advance; we'll send a list to participants) and the text of a simple book, like a novel or biography. If all participants have InDesign CS4 or CS5, we'll use that, and if not we'll create epubs using free tools. Participants will often work with HTML and CSS code – prior experience with HTML and CSS is helpful but not necessary.

Additional prep

It will be helpful if participants have attended or read the course notes for Designing for Digital beforehand.

We'll be covering much of the content on our knowledgebase about creating epubs. If you want a headstart, or to see the kind of things we'll be doing, head over there.

When, where and how much

The series runs on Tuesdays 13, 20, 27 July and 3 August, from 6 to 9 pm, at EBW's offices.

Cost: R3500 ex VAT per person. We can take a maximum of 6 people on this course. We'll run it if we have at least 3 participants. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

 

Consulting

Our consulting services are led by Arthur Attwell (profile on LinkedIn), who has worked in and with large and small publishers in South Africa and the UK for over ten years. He specialises in combining the best of traditional book-production techniques with current technology, especially with regard to ebooks, print-on-demand, websites and web applications.

 

Knowledge base

The EBW Knowledge Base is a growing collection of reference material that we’ve put together for our own use, and that you may find useful too. It's a collaborative forum that allows you to comment and us to update our advice accordingly.

 

Training

We offer one-on-one or group training in digital-publishing skills and strategy. We believe every publishing organisation can easily develop in-house digital-publishing skills, and our training gets you started.

We've also started publishing how-to information in our EBW Knowledge Base.

 

Clients

Our digital publishing and consulting clients have included a wide range of organisations and individuals.

Read more...