Electric Book links: game-changing books, mix-n-match artwork, and Indie bookstores
After months of high secrecy, we can finally talk about an exciting new project: for indie news outlet Daily Maverick, our team managed the production of We Have A Game Changer, which chronicles their work over the last ten years, including their brave release and coverage of the Gupta Leaks.
It’s a beautiful book that you should buy. What I like most is that we’ve created a website edition, too, which Daily Maverick will publish soon for free, so that anyone can read it even if they can’t afford the book.
Design
In an extraordinary gift to the world, illustrator Leni Kauffman has published Fresh Folk, an open, mix-and-match illustration library of people and objects. It’s simply executed: a set of fourteen Photoshop files, each containing a dozen or more optional elements as layers. It’s a wonderfully simple way to add beautiful illustrations to book and web projects.
Business
I highly, highly recommend this episode of the Rework podcast, ‘Nevermore, Amazon’, which tells the story of Danny Caine’s Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas. It’s a fascinating, enlightening look into what it takes to be a successful indie bookstore in the age of Amazon.
Tech
As publishers look for ways to spice up their epubs, developers have to figure out which epub readers support Javascript. In response to a question on the EBooks StackExchange, I wrote up what we know at the moment.
And, while you’re digging around inside your epubs, Marisa DeMeglio has written a useful guide to testing for conformance and accessibility, and what to look for manually. Pair that with Simon Collinson’s great overview of ACE from DAISY.
Work
Remember when ISBNs became thirteen-digit numbers, instead of ten-digit ones? Amazingly, many systems still support the ten-digit version, but that runway has finally ended. If your system still allows ten-digit ISBNs, you’ll need to turn that off – or get very creative – when the 979 prefix arrives in the US next year.
Which reminds me, if you need to create simple ISBN barcodes for the backs of your books, I made a quick, free way to generate them .
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