Digital self-publishing of photos

[LocalHero1953]

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Does anyone have experience of producing downloadable ebooks or online-readable photobooks?

 

On the downloadable front.........

 

- PDFs. They're too large (for high quality images) to distribute by email, and if you want to create better custom formats than Blurb (and others) allows, you need the full Adobe Acrobat. They also don't adapt well to phone, tablet and PC screen formats.

 

- I've tried using Blurb to produce an ebook based on a physical photobook, but Blurb's tool is too clunky to be usable. I haven't tried others.

 

- The Apple ecosystem has iBooks Author, but I'm using Windows:rolleyes:.

 

- Adobe Indesign with the CircularSoftware plugin looks like it would do the job, but at Adobe's £17/month it's quite expensive for an amateur.

 

So I've looked at online hosted systems, and wonder if ISSUU - Digital Publishing Platform for Magazines, Catalogs, and more is a good option. They are focussd on magazines, but have some one-off photobooks in their listings which look quite good. They seem to be free to view, not pay-per-view. Cheap alternatives include Yudu.

 

Any experience advice? Can one make real money this way, or is it just vanity publishing? (I'm happy to be a vanity publisher if it doesn't cost much!)

 

Edit: to moderators - I have no connection with issuu or any other publishing platform and I'm not trying to promote them with this post.

[250swb]

How do you find Blurb 'clunky'? It seems pretty simple and easy to use, but it is the same as any software, do it the first time and there is learning curve, do it the second time and it is a breeze.

 

Steve

[andybarton]

I've used Blurb for the last two Forum Books and found it to be extremely good, both printed and eBook.

[DigitalHeMan]

I recently printed a Blurb book using the Lightroom plugin - worked very well and was simple to create

[LocalHero1953]

How do you find Blurb 'clunky'? It seems pretty simple and easy to use, but it is the same as any software, do it the first time and there is learning curve, do it the second time and it is a breeze.

 

Steve

 

The Blurb book production process itself I find fine and easy. I've done it both from LR and from BookSmart, and I've been delighted with the printed product. But I wanted to convert it to an ebook format that I could distribute/display on-screen to friends. You can pay for a PDF from Blurb's website, which also produces a nice high quality file, but sadly a 50 page colour book yielded a 47Mb file.

 

The Blurb website offers the option to convert your book to an ebook format, but I never found out what file format it was, or what size it was. I pressed the button to start the conversion process; the first message was that my chosen caption font (Myriad Pro, which I think was the Lightroom default) was not licensed for ebook production, and I had to pick another from a list of unfamiliar fonts with no indication what they looked like. I picked a Helvetic/Arial clone, and the ebook conversion completed; I was then told that there were errors on many pages resulting from the text overrunning the text boxes. At this stage, not only was there no apparent way to go back and change the font, but if you cancelled the whole conversion process and started again, it remembered the font you had chosen and didn't give you the option to change it. Blurb does allow you to edit all your text boxes individually to make them big enough, but by now I'd decided Blurb's system was a lemon, and I should look at other options. I should add that I've seen these same grouches on other forums.

 

Sorry to explain the gory detail, but I'd be delighted to hear from others who have created an ebook in Blurb without running into these issues. And, if you were successful, did it produce a file significantly smaller than a PDF, which is what I want.

 

Edit: having done a bit of research, the ebook format that seems most appropriate is to the EPUB3 Fixed Layout standard. Adobe Indesign plus a plugin can apparently do it, but I don't want to pay £17/month for Indesign on top of my Adobe CC photographers subscription.

[LocalHero1953]

I've used Blurb for the last two Forum Books and found it to be extremely good, both printed and eBook.

 

Andy, I apologise that I haven't downloaded the Forum book (I promise to do so now!) but you clearly had no problems - did the font/text overflow issue not happen at all? Can you give detail about what font you used in Lightroom, and whether you had to change it for the ebook?

[DigitalHeMan]

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You can create a PDF from directly within Lightroom. There are various freeware tools that you can then use to convert the PDF into a mobi format for ereaders.

[LocalHero1953]

Thanks, Simon. Can you point me in the direction of one? I looked at Calibre, but it says it cannot deal with image-based PDFs - it tries to separate the text from the images, which is not helpful for captions.

 

Another comment I've seen is that converting from PDF does not reduce the file size much, because it renders the whole page as a graphic image with text placed on it. EPUB files are based on a markup language, however, so if you can convert directly to EPUB from your book design you should get a smaller file. I'm quoting from other websites, however, and may have misunderstood.

 

Andy: I've bought the ebook, and it has been downloading to my iPad for more than an hour (I'm on basic but reasonably fast broadband). I see it is designed for reading in iBooks: did you have the option of converting to a version readable on a PC?

 

I would like to create and distribute/sell ephotobooks, but excessive download time would be a showstopper, as would a limitation to iOS/mac.

 

I feel like I'm on a steep and rocky learning curve here, and I'm sorry if I'm asking dumb questions:)

[andybarton]

The eBook is obviously formatted for reading on an iPad. And presumably other tablet devices.

 

From memory, you can also read the file in a PC or Mac, but you don't get the front or back cover. I will have to have a look.

[LocalHero1953]

FYI, this is the info given in the email with instructions for downloading:

 

".......

1. Open this email on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.

2. If you do not have the free Apple iBooks app you’ll need to install it before downloading your book.

3. Follow this link to get the book: #####

(This link will expire in 48 hours, after which you will be prompted to log in)

4. Safari will open and begin downloading the ebook to your device.

5. When the download is complete, you will be given the option to 'Open in iBooks'. Tap this button once.

6. iBooks wi ll launch, import the ebook, and then open it for viewing.

...................."

 

By implication, it's not available for reading on a PC. If downloading to my ipad fails, I'll try downloading to my PC and see if a third party reader is available.

[andybarton]

ePub books open in iBooks on the Mac. No idea about on a PC, though.

[LocalHero1953]

My download of the Leica Forum ebook to ipad must have locked up. I cancelled it and downloaded on my PC instead - it was "only" 28Mb, which is not bad for a book with so many pages. I opened it in Calibre, and it looked good. Images wouldn't show full screen on my 27" without pixellation, but I guess that is desirable to avoid theft.

 

I see that the font is Arial or similar. If this was the original font as for the printed book, then it may not have raised licensing issues, or could have been easily substituted. Unfortunately I have a book that I want to convert where I have used an unusual font for which Blurb could not offer an equivalent. I'm not sure how to get over that.

 

I shall try a few tools for converting pdf to epub and see what happens.

 

I'd still be interested in anyone else's experience in producing ebooks or using online services like Issuu.

 

Moderator: please transfer this thread elsewhere if more appropriate.

[LocalHero1953]

To wrap this up for the moment....

 

Calibre was unable to convert a PDF of a photo book to EPUB format - it jumbled up text and images irretrievably.

 

PDFMate PDF Converter Professional (free) did the job surprisingly well. It rendered the PDF pages as they stood, without trying to separate text and images (these are options you can select). It reduced image resolution, but not totally unacceptably, and ended up with a 10Mb EPUB file from a 41MB PDF. I loaded it onto my ipad and opened it in iBooks. It displayed either as vertically scrolling pages or as a two-page spread. iBooks leaves a gap between pages where the spine is, so photos spread across two pages do not show to their best.

 

So now I have the basic tools to take a PDF of a photo book either from the Blurb module in Lightroom or from Blurb's website and convert it into a usable EPUB file.