BISG Reports On E-Reading

Part 1 of this year's Book Industry Study Group survey, released yesterday, reveals that e-book consumers are buying more, but spending less in brick-and-mortar stores. "More than a third of e-book buyers decreased their spending at national chains and 29% said they are buying less from their local indie." The survey was conducted by Bowker Market Research and focused on "Power Buyers" - those who acquire e-books at least weekly, and are considered a leading market indicator of consumer trends. More than half have increased the use of apps to acquire their content, while over a third said they use primarily online retailers such as Amazon.

Among other findings of note was that dedicated e-reading devices are the preferred consumption medium for 60.9% of respondents (down slightly from 71.6%), while 17% said tablets were their device of choice (up from 13%), showing that while multimedia devices are gaining headway, the progress is slow with regard to electronic reading. Interestingly, the percentage of those who prefer their smartphone nearly doubled from 5.3% to 9.2%, indicating that the convenience of mobile access is a primary factor for many.

These highlights are taken from the report summary. The full report will set you back $6750, unless you're a member, in which case it's only $3550. However, you can download a sample of the report here (which contains some useful information, including charts showing relative market share of book formats), and the full list of survey questions asked here, just in case you're interested in answering them yourself. Subsequent updates are scheduled to appear in April, July, and October.

One telling statement from the report was that it represents "the calm before the storm" that was unleashed during the 2011 holiday season. Subsequent reports will evaluate the impact of that storm, but a few points are mentioned. For example, gifting of Kindle e-books increased 175% over last year's pre-holiday period (Amazon themselves had announced that Christmas Day was the biggest day ever for Kindle downloads). According to Bowker, "e-books accounted for 15% of all units sold in North America in the third quarter of 2011, compared with 4% in the same period of 2010." Total e-reader sales for 2011 are estimated at 63.3 million units, a veritable storm indeed. One can only imagine the effect those devices will have on this year's figures.

iPad 3 Display Resolution

This is a nice microscopic shot of the iPad 2 screen compared with what is purported to be coming next week with the iPad 3. As you can see, the amount of detail provided by the higher resolution pixel depth is quite astounding in comparison, with four times as many bits of information in the same amount of space.

I've talked about the implications and importance of this in posts before (in my fixed layout tutorial here, and two discussions in December here and here), but this image provides a really solid visual depiction of what is about to occur. For those of us who create graphic content for use on this device, it's akin to the difference between Space Invaders and Super Mario. Okay, it's not that extreme, but you get my point. In fact, it's much more like the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray, or what is about to happen with 4K televisions. It will produce truly crisp and crystal clear imagery on a portable device large enough to actually be able to see the details (smartphone screens are just too small for my poor eyes).

While individual pixels are discernible on the iPad 2, this next generation display is nearing the limits of what the human eye can differentiate, rendering images more photo-realistic and vastly more nuanced with fine and subtle detail. Just as importantly, it will allow images to be zoomed to larger sizes while retaining clarity and focus. This is critical for digital artwork, whose every pixel is created and colored by hand. But it also presents some problems for images created for the early lower-resolution screens. See my prior posts for more on that, but if you're an artist or content creator, just be aware that images at 1024x768 will pixelate and/or appear at half their previous size on the newer screens. Unless, of course, you've taken my advice and made them larger than the iPad 2 display already.

AAP 2011 Books Sales Stats

The Association of American Publishers has released their final stats for 2011 U.S. book sales, which are summarized in the charts below. The first one shows the figures for December compared to the same month a year before, giving us pre-holiday sales comparisons. Ebooks were up for the month by 72%, one of the poorest showing for digital during all of 2010.

This is more than likely due to the gift-giving run-up to the holiday, in which shoppers are finding themselves a bit befuddled: do you buy your book loving gift recipient a print book, knowing they already have or are getting an e-Reader for Christmas? Or do you settle for a bookstore gift card, or more adventurously attempt to gift an actual ebook, hoping to choose the right format?

The answer seemed to be to give them something else instead (such as the e-Reader itself), since print sales hardly made up the difference in digital's "meager" showing (virtually every other month of 2011 showed at least a 100% increase, with February breaking 200%). While all major print categories were down, the Children's/Young Adult Hardcover segment put in a strong showing, with a 12.3% increase over 2010. I guess we know what kids got for Christmas this year. Adult Mass Market fared the worst, with a 40.9% decline from $57 million in December 2010 to just $33.8 this year.

Turning to overall Year-To-Date sales, all print segments saw losses for the year, with Adult Mass Market down the most by nearly 36% over 2010. Both Adult Hardcover and Paperbacks saw double-digit declines, and even the buoyant holiday winning Children's/YA Hardbacks sector lost almost 5% on the year. Overall, Trade sales fell for the year by just over 4%, with ebooks coming in at a respectable +117.3% - down from its one-time cumulative high of 162.9% in April.
According to these figures, for the full year 2011, ebooks accounted for 21.4% of total book sales. This excludes Religious titles, since digital is not broken out of those figures (nor included in the ebook numbers, so it could be higher or lower, but there's no way to know from this). Additionally, Digital Audiobooks are not included, since there are no stats provided for physical audiobook sales as a comparison (and why that is I do not know: does anybody still buy audiobooks on tape or cd besides libraries and truckers?). Downloaded Audiobooks have been making consistently decent gains for several years, so I can only guess that physical audiobook sales are taking a relatively dramatic hit.

For the record, these figures represents sales data provided to the AAP by 77 publishers, including all the major trades. However, this does not account for the thousands of independent publishers, nor the millions of self-published titles out there, the vast majority of which are mainly ebooks. How much that would skew the numbers can only be surmised.

Mirasol Color Display Demo

Here's a quick video shot at Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona, showing the latest version of the color Mirasol displays for tablet devices. The color is still somewhat muted, but has advanced dramatically from just a year ago, when the colors were little more than pastels. Here the color is much richer with deeper tones and higher contrast. This is helped along by a lighted backdrop that turns on and off to compensate for low (or no) ambient light. Just as important, however, is the vastly improved refresh rate, which looks almost instantaneous, and is certainly as good as most e-readers on the market today, including some with LCD screens. Look to see these on the next generation Kindle Touch and Nook eReaders. The era of black and white is coming to a close.

Free Ring Saga KF8 Sample Chapter

I've completed formatting the Kindle Fire edition of The Ring Saga, Chapter 1: Theft of the Rhinegold, which you can now download over at the Fantasy Castle Books website. As with the iPad edition, this is something of a Beta Test, so feel free to leave feedback or send in comments if you see anything amiss, or have suggestions for improvement in any area, whether technical or creative.

As I mentioned in my last post, there are a few assorted quirks in KF8 that I've employed to my advantage as best I could, including:

1. No Orientation Lock - you can view the content in either portrait or landscape mode, although portrait orientation is the intended layout for full page view. As you can see, I've added decorative borders to the top and bottom of the pages to fill up the Kindle Fire's slightly taller 7" display. The Fire does not feature two-page layout view in landscape as the iPad does, and its widescreen aspect ratio would not adequately accommodate it anyway. This makes individual pages render rather small in landscape mode. However...

2. Image Zoom - you can double-tap the background art to view it without text overlays, and then use pinch-and-zoom to scale the image to a larger size. The actual resolution of the embedded images is 1024x1748 at the highest quality setting I could get within the 800kb per image limit (generally either 9 or 10 out of 12 in Photoshop). Hopefully with the upcoming Kindle 10" Tablet this limit will be removed (or further increased) and I can insert even higher quality images. The speculated larger screen size Kindle is one of the primary reasons I've been adamant about including the highest resolution art that is allowed. This makes the file size rather large, at 24Mb for just this first chapter. The complete finished work should come in at around 150 megabytes or so. And that's just for the first book out of four.

3. Region Magnification - you can double-tap on text to increase it by 150% and read it formatted in standard text blocks rather than wrapped around the background images. Swipe left or right to move from one text box to the next, or double-tap to dismiss and return to full page view. I have not used the comics-mode Panel Zoom feature to enlarge areas of the art because there are no individual panels here to zoom, and the full image background zoom works better for this project.

I've tried to make the wrapped text as legible as possible, with obvious paragraph indents and a background glow layer behind the text to make it stand out. But this has been something of a compromise at times, so let me know if there's anyplace where the text is just too cumbersome and difficult to read and I'll see what I can do to amend it. It's been a bit of a learning curve, and you should find it becomes easier to read as this section progresses, since I've learned to avoid really complex wrapping such as that found on pages 3-4, which was a major pain to layout.

A NOTE ON THE FORMAT:

This is the KF8 edition for the Kindle Fire only. KF8 has not yet been rolled out for the Kindle apps or other device models, so it will only work correctly on the Fire itself. As Amazon rolls out KF8 further I'll test it and make the necessary adjustments, but for now this version is intended to be viewed only on the Kindle Fire device.

Further Thoughts On KF8

Now that I've been working with KF8's fixed-layout awhile, I thought I'd share a trick or two I've learned in case you're interested. Like Apple's iBooks, KF8 has a lot of quirks and peculiarities all its own, but if you learn the way it works then you can often find a way to bend the rules.

ORIENTATION LOCK

Although the Kindle Publishing Guidelines state that the two available options for the "orientation-lock" metadata entry are either portrait or landscape, you can actually enter "none". This disables the lock and allows the content to reorient to the tablet's current position. This would seem most useful with reflowable content since, of course, with fixed layout the aspect ratio is set, and while the content will auto-zoom or shrink to fit the screen, it does so to the longest edge. This makes a page in portrait layout very small in landscape. However...

ZOOMING IMAGES

There are two alternate ways to insert images into KF8, as indicated in the samples provided for Children's Books and Comics. In the former a div element is created with an id that references the image source in the related css. In this mode the image is locked within the div block, and only content inserted into an overlaid region mag element can be zoomed. However, in the comic sample, the background image is simply referenced using standard html img src= tags. This allows for the region zooming feature which magnifies a specific area of the background image within a defined mag target frame. The magnification is actually created by restoring an oversized background image to its actual size (the image on the screen being shrunk to fit), with the frame acting as a window that lets you view only the selected area at full resolution.

But you don't have to create a window to do this at all. If you simply double-tap on an area of the background image that's not covered by a mag target tap zone, the entire image will "zoom" to the only window available: the Kindle Fire screen itself. Any text overlays will disappear, leaving only the selected image, with a circled X in the upper-right corner to facilitate exiting the zoom mode. While in this mode you can use pinch-and-zoom to view the image larger, rotate to either orientation (if the lock has been set to "none" as mentioned above), and drag the image around the screen with your finger. With the image size now upgraded to 800kb, this allows for images of relatively high quality at 1024x1748 - the width of the display screen in landscape orientation, and nearly three times the height. This seems a natural size for the full resolution image, since you can view full width in landscape and scroll up and down to see the rest of the image.

Unfortunately, the Fire is not as advanced as the iPad in having the cool "snap back" feature which keeps the image from being zoomed larger than the chosen viewport size. Still, this provides a way for the user to view and scroll the entire background image at a higher resolution without resorting to smaller cropped sections. Those, of course, can be added as well, so long as an obvious area remains where the background can be double-tapped (and the user knows the feature is available).

TEXT WRAPPING

My primary goal with KF8 fixed layout at the moment (and iBooks as well) is to create text that appears to wrap around images when in fact there is no text wrap feature available in the Kindle code other than around square boxes. To my mind the ability to wrap around complex objects is one of the fundamental advantages of Pages and the new iBooks Author drag-and-drop feature, and one for which I'm nearly willing to cave in and buy a Mac. Still, there are ways around it.

While KF8 does not allow the use of left/right: #px; tags within mag target boxes, you can replace them with margin-left / margin-right tags instead, or text-indent for left indentations only. But in order to do so you will need to wrap each individual line of text in <p> tags and position them each separately. In the image above, for example, the first full paragraph is set to text-align: justify, but each line after that is a separate paragraph, positioned using either right-align (plus some word-spacing and/or letter-spacing to adjust the line width to my liking), or the default left alignment with an indent or left margin setting for just that line. This requires separate line entries in the css (i.e. p.line13), each of which can then be individually manipulated.

This is somewhat tedious, to be sure, but the end result appears to be a text wrap function that does not, in fact, exist. In actuality, there is no image to wrap the text around in my example, since the figure is simply part of the background.

TEXT SHADOWS

While KF8 (and iBooks as well) allow for text shadows in the css, they only allow for one. In other words, you cannot create complex, multi-color shadows using multiple, sequential text-shadow entries as you can in most web browsers. Both KF8 and iBooks will only recognize and last entry given, which overrides any others entered above it. For my current project I required both a dark text shadow to offset the text against light areas of background color, as well as a glow layer to lighten darker areas behind the text. This was achieved by using multiple duplicated text layers on a z-index stack. The top layer has a fairly dark green drop shadow (1px 1px 3px #185244), while the bottom (otherwise identical) text layer provides a large light green surrounding glow, centered on the text rather than offset (0px 0px 40px #edffe7). I had already lightened up the text area somewhat in the background image itself, so not all of the lightening seen in the image above is from the text glow, but any stray dark areas are evened out somewhat this way and the text rendered more easily readable by its higher contrast with the background art.

ZOOMING TEXT

Below is a shot of my current Ring Saga project with the text zoomed in the Kindle Fire on the left and the same page seen in its full two-page spread on the iPad on the right. While you can retain the shape of wrapped text in the zoomed text box, you can also format the mag target separately, which I've done here, using fully justified text over a parchment backdrop. This gives the user the option of reading the text in something closer to a standard book layout, while also being able to view the art layout. Instructions for doing this are in the Guidelines, but I thought I'd offer an example of what I've done. It's certainly not as ideal as the iPad's ability to zoom fixed layouts to any size desired using pinch-and-zoom, but it's better than no option for enlarging text at all.

And while I'm on the subject of text, the function I'm most disappointed with in KF8 fixed layout is not having access to dictionary definitions by tapping words. Without that feature the purpose of embedding live text is virtually rendered null and void, particularly given that the search functionality is disabled as well. The only reason I can see at present for going to all the trouble of adding live text to a fixed layout Kindle ebook is in the hopes that Amazon will get its act together and fix these issues at some later date. For the time being, however, KF8 FL is little more than a PDF that's really frigging hard to make.

KF8 Graphic Novel Sample

There is now a KF8 graphic novel sample file available on Amazon's KF8 Overview page. This makes clear a number of questions posed by the somewhat sketchy graphic novel section in the Kindle Publishing Guidelines update. So if you're interested in how the Kindle Fire Panel View works, you can now open up the sample and have a look behind the scenes.

Among the things I've noticed is that metadata entries are included for both "comic" and "children" book-types, rather than one or the other. The "hybrid experience" mentioned in section 5.3.4 of the Guidelines does not state explicitly that both content types must be specified in order to create magnified text boxes in graphic novels, nor even that you can add both. Nor is the specific functionality of these two classifications anywhere clearly defined, but it is presumed the "comic" setting allows for image zoom, while "children" provides the text box magnification feature. However, a quick test in changing "children" to "comic" in my own KF8 version of The Ring Saga made no difference that I could ascertain, as text boxes still zoomed just the same.

Additionally, there are a few unique elements in the .opf's metadata section, most notably in two new zero reset functions:

<meta name="zero-gutter" content="true"/>
<meta name="zero-margin" content="true"/>

Presumably these are designed to remove the default white space in the margins of the Kindle app, although their use is not included, nor explained, in the Publishing Guidelines, and I'm only guessing at the purpose of their inclusion. Certainly this is not required for fixed-layout content on the Fire.

There is also an enhanced doctype declaration in the html files:

SYSTEM "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"

as well as the additional meta element:

meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"

Neither of these are present in the KF8 children's sample, but presumably they provide enhanced functionality not present in the 1999 standard but not yet finalized in HTML5.

Regardless, the sample provides much clearer examples as to how the Panel View region magnification functions, and how the larger resolution images can be used. The CSS in particular provides a wealth of information about how the mag regions are created and positioned, although at best it still seems an extremely tedious process of trial and error will be required to fine tune the zoomed image's location. Still, at least it's now possible to do, which is a start.

DAZ Free Software Offer

For a limited time only DAZ is giving away over $800 worth of 3D rendering and modeling software, in three of the best programs out there. For anyone at all interested in giving 3D art a try, this is an awesome opportunity to grab some top notch tools.

DAZ Studio 4 Pro is the latest edition of the award winning 3D animation program which boasts some of the most leading edge advances in model manipulation and rendering, including the new Genesis figures that can morph into almost any shape or form imaginable. While you can buy the basic version of DAZ for a meager fifty bucks, the Pro edition normally retails for $430, and is well worth every penny for what you get. I've been using Poser for several years now (including the new Poser Pro 2012), but with the release of the Genesis figures I've been wanting badly to upgrade my plain vanilla DAZ to the Pro edition (and now I have!). Both programs are very similar, so if you know how to use Poser, you'll be able to dive right in to DAZ without any trouble. For those who've never used a 3D animation program, the learning curve can be quite steep (and tortuously unending), but in no time you'll be creating truly stunning works of art, even if you can't draw a stick figure to save your life. All of the art for The Ring Saga was created using 3D models.

Bryce is an environment creation tool, with the ability to produce utterly astounding digital worlds for your characters to populate. I honestly haven't used it much, as it's almost overwhelming in its possibilities, but if you want to build a fantastic backdrop for your 3D creations, this is the tool to use. Bryce Pro 7 retails at $250, so you can save yourself enough to buy a Kindle Fire and have some left over. The package comes with a ton of awesome content to get you started as well, from water planes to lush foliage, a multitude of terrain types, and a wide variety of skies.

Hexagon is a modeling tool for those who want to create their own 3D models instead of relying on the common stock of what's available to buy (which is a lot, by the way). I haven't done any modeling at all from scratch, so I'm looking forward to testing this program out. You can do a lot with morphs alone (my Alberich character was created entirely by morphing the crap out of a standard male figure model), but to create truly unique creations you really have to start from scratch and design your own. Plus, once you do you can sell them to others who don't want to bother! Hexagon 2.5 would set you package $150, but today it's free!

Click the image above to check it out.

Kindle Publishing Guide Updated

Amazon has quietly updated their Kindle Publishing Guide to include new content in the section concerning the creation of graphic novels. There was no official announcement of this update that I'm aware of, but the Guide now bears the edition number 2012.2, presumably indicating the year and month of release (the first version came out on January 11th, but bore no edition number).

The new section covers how to create Panel View magnification targets to zoom selected sections of a page. As with the rest of the Guide, the details are sketchy at best, and the questions it leaves many. Unfortunately, Amazon has not provided a sample graphic novel to use as reference as they have for children's books and the standard KF8 format. Additionally, all the KF8 graphic novels that I've downloaded so far are DRM'd, so that I haven't been able to crack them open and look at their underlying code. I'm still having some issues getting absolute positioning to work correctly with text layers in the zoom regions, which is a bit frustrating to say the least.

Of primary importance, however, is the increase in the allowed size of image files to 800Kb in order to account for the necessary higher resolution graphics that are required. With zoom factors ranging up to 250%, recommended image resolution is as much as 1560x1500 pixels for a half page in landscape orientation, or 1536x900 for a full page image set to the default 150% zoom factor. This allows small print in fixed layout to be viewed at larger sizes, and artwork details to be viewed up close. In addition, the Panel View provides a "guided view" with the zoomed sections proceeding sequentially with each swipe.

Beyond allowing for zooming areas to view more detail, the benefit applies to full page images in general, as high quality art can now be added without having to use highly compressed jpegs that blur and distort details even at their default size. The down side, of course, is larger overall file size, effectively removing the 70% royalty option for graphic novels, since the bandwidth charge would likely be greater than the profit margin (see my post here for more on that). However, at the 35% royalty margin no bandwidth fee is assessed, so your ebook file can be a large as you like (within reason, of course: no one wants to fill up their Kindle with just one book).

EPUB3: DOA

Barely more than a month ago, on January 1st, I made the prediction that the newly released ePub3 specification would "fail in its effort to heal ebook format fragmentation." This was, in fact, my number one prediction, and while it's hardly earth-shattering, it's happened faster than expected, and for the very reasons I outlined.

Less than two weeks into 2012 Amazon released the main specs for their new KF8 format, based mainly on ePub, but with a whole new set of a proprietary requirements for fixed layout features such as area magnification, and with severe restrictions on others such as image size and orientation. In addition, they use their own metadata entries to declare fixed layout properties. While KF8 is in essence an ePub in its structure, once converted into mobi via KindleGen it becomes proprietary and can only be read on a Kindle system. ePub files themselves are not recognized by Kindle devices.

Then, just a week later, Apple announced their new .ibooks format, along with the only tool that can be used to make it, iBooks Author. Again, the underlying structure is essentially an ePub, but with a host of new code elements that are entirely unique to Apple, with no relation whatsoever to anything in ePub. So complex and undefined are these new elements that there is no possibility of coding them by hand, so that what was once in essence an ePub is now something altogether different. And of course, it can only be read in Apple's iBooks system (and currently only on the iPad).

This is the direction things are going. As mentioned in my prediction, advances in technology and innovation in individual applications are far outpacing ePub's ability to keep up, to the point that very soon these formats will likely do away with the ePub structure altogether, since there's no inherent reason that they need it if the end goal is to produce a unique proprietary format. With KF8 you can at least begin with an ePub file and then modify it to meet the Kindle Fire requirements. But Apple has removed even that possibility. IBooks format files must be built from scratch, using their software, or not at all (and they must be sold via Apple's iBookstore, and consumed via Apple tablets).

Of course, Apple still accepts ePubs in their standard iBooks model (albeit with some custom modifications, such as the com.apple file), as does Barnes & Noble (though only for reflowable texts: BNKids format is so proprietary they won't even release the spec), but for fixed layout ebooks ePub3 has never really had a chance.

The idea of creating an open standard that many reading systems can handle is a noble, but unrealistic goal. It's just not a practical business model on which to build an empire. Success at the level at which Apple and Amazon are competing is accomplished by creating brand identity and loyalty. This is how Apple has sustained itself for many years, and how the Kindle became the first successful ebook reader. Certainly there are many other factors, among which producing a quality product is foremost. But to create a product of quality one must first create a product that stands apart from the others, and that by its very definition is a proprietary product.

While we will likely never see a major ePub3 reader, the market will be swamped with generic devices and off-brands that will do the job. But none of them will be truly great, relegating ePub3 to the sidelines and the cheap or free titles. Because of this it is unlikely ePub3 will ever reach its full potential.

How To Create Fixed-Layout iBooks, Part 7

Now that you have a working fixed-layout ebook filled with pretty images you'll probably want to add some text. After all, what's a story without words? In this installment of the iBooks tutorial we'll look at how to add live text as a layer over or around your art.

EMBEDDING FONTS

While you can rely on any of the fifty or so fonts and variations already included on the iPad, you will likely want to use others at times to create a certain look or feel. In the screenshot of my Ring Saga project above several different fonts are being used to achieve the stylistic effect I want. To do so you must include the font in your ebook package.

Bear in mind, however, that many commercial fonts don't allow embedding, so be sure to look at the font's properties to see if embedding rights have been restricted. You'll want to do this before you spend a lot of time creating your ebook file, only to discover that you have to replace your chosen font with something else that's only moderately close.

First, create a folder in your OEBPS directory named "fonts" and put your chosen font file there. This isn't necessary, and you can put your files anywhere you like, but it's always good practice to keep things neat and orderly so that you can find what you're after when you need to. If you only have a single font to embed you can just as easily add it at the root level, but if you're building something fairly complex it's best to organize each set of elements in their own location.

Next, you need to list this new addition in your manifest, so open up your content.opf and add a line that references the font. Here's the sample template entry:

<item id="Storybook" href="fonts/Storybook.ttf" media-type="font/truetype"></item>

The item id can be anything you like, so long as it makes sense, as you'll reference it later in the css. Enter your href as a relative location from the content.opf itself, as it is here with the folder/file name provided. The media-type defines what kind of font it is, and for the iPad this can be TrueType, OpenType or SVG.

Finally, before we begin formatting our text, we need to specify that we're using embedded fonts in the com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml way back up there in the META-INF folder. Add the following line to the platform(s) of your choice:

<option name="specified-fonts">true</option>

Without this entry system fonts will be used to render your text instead.

CREATING YOUR CONTENT

Before you can format your text you'll need to add some. If you take a look inside the sample template at the html for page 2 you'll find a line of text that has been added in a paragraph tag. You'll also see that in the <head> section a css stylesheet for page02 has been referenced so that the reading system knows where to find the formatting data for this text.

<link href="css/page02.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"/>

<p class="line1">Start your story here!</p>

The template includes only a single line of text, prompting you to start your own story, but for a slightly more complex example here's the html for the left page of the Ring Saga screenshot above:

In the body we find a header, three separate lines of text with individual class references, a fourth paragraph with multiple lines separated by breaks, a fifth line which includes an external link, and a final line containing a page number. Giving each of these paragraph elements their own class allows you to format them individually, both in terms of style and placement. But they can also share overall paragraph formatting features, such as color and alignment, or the use of a specific embedded font.

This is done in the CSS file (or files) referenced on this page. Here we see that two separate CSS files have been referenced, one for overall ebook style properties and a second for the specific content on this page. Although this can all be done in a single file, if your ebook contains a lot of complex formatting this file can become bloated and difficult to navigate very quickly. Using one general style sheet along with separate ones for each page is far cleaner, as well as making it much easier to find and fix any stray errors that may creep in.

CALLING YOUR FONTS

All your major text formatting should be done with CSS rather than in the HTML file itself (aside from specific instances such as italics or bold and the like). Therefore, if you're using embedded fonts to format your text it's in the CSS that you must reference them. You do this using the @font-face entity:

You generally enter just the font-family, its base style and weight (i.e. italic, bold), and a source that references the font location, using the format shown, giving absolute location from the file's root level.

All other font formatting is given in the tags for that particular element or class. So here, for example, we see the sample template paragraph formatting for our one line of text, which gives a default set of parameters at the paragraph level, such as size and color, as well as some overall positioning information that tells the system we want to place our elements using absolute positioning with no added pixels for margins, etc. Any of these general settings can be overridden at the class level for individual elements.

I won't get into CSS specifics, as that's a subject of its own, but iBooks supports a fairly large range of elements, including text shadows and spacing between both words and letters.

An example of some formatting you can apply is shown here in the formatting for my copyright page text. Colors can be given by name, RGB values, or hexidecimal codes as shown here. Text shadows are given as four elements, the first two being the vertical and horizontal distance shifted (with positive and negative values allowed), the amount of blur, and the color of the shadow.

For the first few lines of text on my copyright page I also used text-transform for uppercase (for p.class "line1") and font-variant for small-caps (lines 2 and 3). The hyperlinked web url in the last line is active, by the way, although for purely aesthetic reasons I've changed the default blue to white in order to make it match the rest. You could also remove the default underline using text-decoration="none", but I left that as a visual cue that the link was live.

POSITIONING YOUR TEXT

Because we're creating fixed layout ebooks here, the exact number of pixels is...well...fixed. This allows us to position elements precisely where we want them by specifying their location vertically and horizontally in pixels. This can be done from any edge, although the default is to place the upper left corner of an element using its distance from the top and left edges. However, it's often easier to use the nearest edge, for example, if you have a small image or a line of text near the bottom that you want to align with a right margin.

You can also use relative positioning to align blocks of text using right-align, center, or justify with margin settings to control the distance from the edges.

The positioning information itself is given for each and every separate element, as for line1 in the sample template example above, which begins 300 pixels from the top and 100 pixels from the left edge of the page. For the lines of text on the right page of my Ring Saga sample shown at the top I simply specified the exact location in pixels where I wanted each separate line to begin. This gave me the ability to create the smooth, flowing contour of the text block's left edge. The text layer remains "live," allowing the use of dictionaries, search functions, and text-to-speech if so enabled. You can also double-tap the text to zoom to the line width.

Positioning such as this can be a very tedious and time-consuming process, filled with much frustration and endless trial and error, but it helps to think in terms of the total page size. A page 1024 pixels wide, for example would have a center point at 512, and ten divisions of roughly a hundred pixels each. Some simple math proves very useful in determining such things as line spacing and margins. One efficient trick is to pull a final page layout into Photoshop, resize it to the your chosen iBooks dimensions, and set the rulers to show pixels. You can then simply place your crosshairs over the point you want to position, note the location in pixels on the horizontal and vertical rulers, and enter those into your CSS file for that element.

One final note regarding the z-index might be mentioned here. Because we've placed our background image at -1 on the stack no further adjustments are required to place your text layer atop the image. However, you may wish to create multiple layers, either of art or text (or both) for one reason or another. This is particularly useful for overlapping individual image elements, but you can also create complex text layers this way as well. Unfortunately, iBooks only allows one text shadow element to be applied to each text layer, but you can create complex shadows and glow effects by duplicating text layers and blurring or changing the color of the ones below. For example, 0px 0px 30px #ffffff would create a white glow completely surrounding your text. Use your imagination.