Best way of creating graphics-heavy, cross-platform, eBooks?

Question

I have been working on converting graphics and layout heavy books (created in Adobe InDesign) into cross-platform eBooks with non-standard functionality (embedded video, audio, interactivity, etc).

Exporting from InDesign to EPUB or other similar formats don't seem to work very well with the types of books I work with. There are all kinds of problems with layout being lost, images getting split apart, etc.

Out of all the different formats available, it looks like a combination of HTML5 & JavaScript is the best way to go. Though, the only way I can figure to do this is to export each page as a JPEG (without the text), then put the page images into an HTML shell, and add in the text using DIV tags (formatting with CSS).

This seems like a lot of work, and the idea of exporting images of pages to make an eBook seems embarrassingly amateurish to me.

I realize that HTML5 isn't quite cross-platform at the moment, but that's not an issue for me right now. I know that Adobe has other options that would be better, but I also need these books to work on the iPad. Unless/until Apple changes their terms, I can't use the technology Adobe developed for the purpose of converting books made in InDesign into apps.

Further, I'd like to add custom features that formats like epub and PDF don't support, but are relatively simple using HTML+JS.

Is there a better way of going from InDesign to some kind of cross-platform eBook format? Or getting everything to HTML, rather than just creating images of the pages and manually adding in all the text?

Answer 1

There are as many eBook formats as there are target markets, so there is no easy answer here.

Since you are keen on maintaining the design, there are some cross-platform eBook formats that are web-based that preserve layouts and allow to add real value (Xplana) and others that simply preserve the layout (CourseSmart, VitalBook). Inkling, a new startup for the iPad, offers some promise. Adobe makes it easy to transform content, but other than PDF they have nothing of note right now except for a couple of public experiments with high-end magazines, and Flash is definitely not an answer for eBooks even if Apple allowed it.

In pretty much all cases, you don't worry about the conversion, you just simply hand over web-optimized PDFs, and a publishing services company (or the distributers themselves) handle the conversion for you to the format that you need for your target market.

In the end, you won't find a single cross-platform format that is going to meet all of your needs. That's a bit of a Holy Grail of book publishing right now. I'd recommend writing up an RFP for your needs and contacting some publishing services companies or high-end compositors to see what they have to offer.