PUBLISHING

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
Following the step-by-step guide to making a simple EPUB (Chapter 6) and
the general introduction to workflows for hybrid publishing (Chapter 7), we
will now address a number of considerations that are specific to each of the
most common publication genres in the field of arts and culture, as described
in chapter 3.
The following points, which apply to all genres, should be clearly defined at
the beginning of any hybrid publication project:
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Will the publication be medium-specific or medium-neutral? In
other words, is the project a one-to-one conversion of a print book
into an electronic book, or will the project include content and
design elements that can only be realized with electronic media?
One should also consider that many of the advantages of a hybrid
publishing approach, as pointed out earlier, lie in modularized or
database publishing. By dividing a larger work into small modules
or ‘building blocks’, it is easier to generate custom publications, to
apply updates to some parts only, to replace ‘heavy’ high-resolution
images or other media files with ‘lighter’ ones when necessary, etc.
Metadata is significantly more important in the context of hybrid
publishing than it is in traditional print publishing. Carefully applied
metadata will ensure that the publication can be found online in
databases and bookstores such as Amazon, and will also make the
electronic editing and design process more efficient. Especially
in the case of modularized or database publishing, it is of utmost
importance to start gathering metadata as early as possible in the
production process. Otherwise it soon becomes impossible to
meaningfully keep track of, and put together, the modular building
blocks of the source document.
For publishers in the field of arts and culture, file sizes pose a fundamental
problem: on one hand, electronic publication seems to offer
new opportunities for including multimedia and other possibilities
not provided by ‘static’ print publishing; on the other hand, in the
real world this often results in files that will be too large to be downloaded,
stored or ‘flipped through’ in a practical manner.
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