PUBLISHING

etc.). It is easy to generate an EPUB on demand from a database or
a content management system (possibly in collaboration with a web
developer and/or web designer) but it can be very difficult and costly
to generate a high-quality PDF from the same source materials.
Some practical tips:
∞∞
∞∞
Save text in the Markdown format, and make use of images in the
highest resolution.
Use a tool like Pandoc to convert the Markdown document to EPUB
and to any of the other file formats you will need once the source
document has been consolidated. Test the EPUB file with several
e-reader devices and applications, unpack (decompress) it and
adjust the HTML and CSS if necessary, and then repack (compress) it
into EPUB when these customizations are done.
The step-by-step guides in the previous chapters provide a detailed description
of how to use these tools.
ARTISTS’/DESIGNERS’ BOOK
There is a rich tradition of artists’ audio-visual electronic books, beginning in
the 1990s with hypertext and interactive multimedia literary experiments on
floppy disks, CD-ROMs, websites and mobile apps. The Electronic Literature
Organization 1 and the international research project ELMCIP 2 have extensively
documented these historical developments. Much of this documentation
can now be considered ‘media archeology’ since the multimedia formats
have gradually become obsolete: CD-ROM applications that no longer run
on contemporary computers, websites whose links or plug-ins are no longer
working or no longer compatible with today’s browsers, etc. This problem
was actually greater in the 1990s and early 2000s, at a time when open,
cross-platform multimedia standards barely existed. And yet, still today, the
more complex the audio-visual materials contained in an electronic book,
the less compatible it will be with various electronic reading devices, and the
1 Electronic Literature Organization, http://eliterature.org.
2 Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase.
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