Using InDesign professionally

[Guest]

Hi, does anybody understand the terms and conditions for Creative Cloud?  I've got a personal, individual subscription plan.  Presumably it is ok for me to use InDesign for professional purposes with this individual plan if I am working on an individual freelance basis?  I can't tell from reading the terms and conditions.  Thanks

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

As long as you have any license to use the software at all, anything you produce with it is your property, to sell, give away or distribute as you choose. The only areas that have some further restrictions are use of Adobe Fonts and stock images, and when those are fully embedded in PDF, EPUB or print form, they are also licensed for any purpose you put them to.

What you can't do is give away any part of the software (you can't give someone Acrobat DC to view and print files, for example — not that that's doable anyway), or the stock material in and of itself, or the fonts.

If you're doing Hollywood productions or international digital magazines, there are some caveats and sub-clauses that might come into play, but in general, at the freelance and small agency level: if you create it, it's yours.

(Which is all as it should be: InDesign and the rest of the suite are top-level professional tools. Creating stuff, on a commercial basis, is what they're for. It's the amateur and office-worker tools that tend to be "free" or "cheap" and then ring in licensing issues for things like commercial reproduction. See also every argument by amateurs about how Adobe stuff is "too expensive." 🙂 )

[Guest]

That's excellent, thank you very much indeed James.  I have actually been reading one of your threads about ebooks for a couple of weeks.  Please can I ask if you know of any books that will help me understand the coding in the main ePub files?  I have some basic understanding of html and css from learning how to build websites.   

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It's quite dense but not difficult to follow: the actual EPUB standard is the best 'book' there is. You can find it and much support information at https://www.w3.org/publishing/epub32/.

As you might have begun to grasp, I have a very low opinion of the bulk of the e-book/EPUB 'expertise' out there on the web. At best, most of it is outdated; at worst, it's overrun by one-trick 'experts' who... well, should be more aware of their limitations. Learning from the standards docs themselves is the somewhat harder road, but at least you won't get muddled and misled about Absolute Truths that haven't been anything of the kind for a decade. 🙂

InDesign makes EPUB creation tons easier than older methods and approaches, and with some guidance on the nuances of that process, you should find very few limitations on what you can do (to the limits of the standard and technology, at least). Besides my guide (of course), I am writing a continuing series of articles on ID-to-EPUB topics — just wrapping up a major one today — that can be found at http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/DPR/dpr_index.php.

And, of course, I and some other very knowledgeable folks are always right here. 🙂

[Guest]

Thank you very much.  I think you should write a book for beginners, there is nothing out there for people who want to understand the nuts and bolts of it all, for example something like the 'building websites for dummies' book which gives people a good overall view of everything you need to build a website with html and css

[Guest]

If you are interested, sometime over the next week I could try to do an outline of the book I would like somebody to write

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Oh, I fully understand what 'beginners' need to know — perhaps all too well. 🙂

The guide actually is a book for beginners — beginners or novices at EPUB and Kindle. It assumes reasonable mastery of Indesign (or Word), and a grasp of HTML/CSS. (It also assumes you know how to write a book.) Everything else is pretty much from scratch. It's not a book for pros... it's a book for designers who want professional results, a topic on which it is absurdly difficult to get reliable guidance.

To back up into actual InDesign and Word techniques and processes, even a little, would double it in length. Ditto for HTML knowledge; let's not even get started on how to write and edit. To try and be a real book for beginners would probably make it two volumes. And as there's already plenty of info on getting to a journeyman level with ID, Word, and HTML, there's not much need to duplicate that info. (Perhaps I should name/market it a little more clearly, though.)

/Editorial Mode On

There are, in my view, two things that drive the dismal level of "help" in the e-book/EPUB world. One is that some vast number of newcomers really are beginners in every way — people who decided to "write a book" and then, discovering all the hurdles in that, were lured to "e-books" because they've read or heard that those are much easier. (Spoiler: they're not. Books is books.) So when someone who isn't even advanced enough to use styles in Word starts seeking help, of the shortest and quickest kind... there's almost no good beginning point. They're at the bottom of a tall mountain of learnin'. (Which is where the EPUB gurus jump in, with their canned, E-Z methods that are about like telling people how to repair their car by making magic passes over the hood.)

The second thing is that in the titanic flood of information out there on e-books and EPUB, a vast amount of it is outdated. Badly outdated. Obsolete. May as well be written in cuneiform, as I've put it. There are many well-meaning experts out there, who have written on the topic for a long time... who neither date their how-to blog entries nor take them down when they are no longer relevant. It's effortless to find a page that seems to be the perfect, well-written, authoritative information... that, after much frustration, a reader finds out is ten years out of date with respect to tools and techniques and standards.

(A third thing, which I won't harp on, is that many... contributors have one narrow line of knowledge they've pieced together, and they share it, often loudly and insistently, as The Universal Solution when it's anything but. It may lead to a perfect soufflé, but that's not much help if you're trying to bake a cake or serve up Boeuf Bourginon.)

/Editorial Mode Off

To come back around to reality, though — when you have enough mastery of ID to turn out well-formatted and -organized print projects (a pretty low bar, really), and enough mastery of HTML/CSS to do decent web pages... you'll find the guide to be very much a beginner's path to EPUB mastery. And I do update it a few times a year with expanded and rewritten info; I'm about to do so with vastly clarified information on managing images.

But... feedback on what you see as the steps and hurdles, from some basic knowledge to something like mastery, is welcome. Either here or in back channels; I can be reached directly through my websites.

[Guest]

Thank you very much.  I will look at the first link you sent me and your website tomorrow, your adobe thread that I've been reading is really funny, you asked a question and a little later on you said you found the answer, it was a link to your book, that really made me laugh!  I actually looked at your book on Amazon yesterday.  I was a copywriter for a bit a long time ago so I have a bit of media and production experience.  I started to learn how to build websites last year and I've been learning a bit about print and graphic design.  I only really started to look into the nuts and bolts of ebooks this week, it strikes me that there's loads of potential as well as difficulties in this area. Thank you again, I look forward to looking at your website and learning more

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Well, thanks to you as well — and I really am always looking for critiques, especially from fresh eyes.

Lest I come off sounding like just another streetcorner ranter on the topic, the book came from asking some difficult, specific technical questions out there in the EPUB community. If I got a single useful answer, I can't bring it to mind. What I got, without exception, and after already having done several books with the process, was that I was just doing it all wrong, especially in using InDesign in the first place, because everyone knows it isn't up to the task.

I've made it something of a jihad to prove otherwise. 🙂

[Guest]

As far as I can see, there's no comprehensive software for ebooks, no one-stop shop like there is for print. I'm not sure if it's possible but it would be good if there was some software that combined the capabilities of dreamweaver and InDesign, for example to be able to see the code. I think a lot of the developers just concentrate on software for the big publishing houses, websites and apps are used more too so naturally attract more attention. Maybe that's another reason why the learning resources are so poor.  The politics of ebooks are unique too, eg. the book industry and printing industry vs amazon, nobody really agreeing on standards.  It's difficult terrain.  I'm glad you think InDesign is a workable tool for ebooks and I will carry on looking into everything. Thank you.

[Guest]

and I buy quite a lot of ebooks, I usually read them on Kindle or iBooks on my iPad.  Amazon are starting to deliver a consistent product on text-rich texts but generally speaking it's pretty shocking how little thought publishers give to ebooks and how a particular book converts to a particular device considering how much publishers charge for the product, they would never get away with that in print

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I completely agree. There is just something about ebooks, even this many years into their being commonplace and mainstream, that promotes/tolerates sloppiness and poor practices all around. I realize I wail, clutch my pearls and palm my face about it a bit much here, but it really does baffle me why the overall field hasn't advanced, at least in some 'central core' even if (as in other avenues) some cling to older notions.

The history is that for a long time there was no way to create most ebook formats, including EPUB, except by the "Lego" or "Build-a-Bear" method: manually create all the pieces, then more or less manually assemble them into the file structure. Better approaches — actual export from formatted layout — has been reasonably mature for several years now, but the vast majority of the amateur/small press crowd clings to the "build it" method, and it looks to me as if many publishers, up to the largest, are still using very primitive, manual processes as well. That they can't seem to be arsed to test or proofread the results, even for the biggest releases...  I have no explanations.

My position, which I won't argue is invulnerable, is that we're well past the point of hand-assembling EPUBs, just like we no longer set lead type. (Or, maybe closer to the point, sit around writing scads of LaTex code!) Tools such as InDesign do a better than good job of the process, with some back-end and support work in CSS making up for its shortcomings, and fully support a visual, esthetically-minded design and development process. I agree that some better tool is needed, but as long as much of the field insists on hand-constructing books in Sigil and the like, improved support in ID or even Word is going to be slow in coming. Ideally, there should be little need to get into the XHTML and CSS; it should be possible to manage the export details from a higher level, just as it is for all the other advanced features.

But until then, I strongly champion the modern approach of using advanced visual layout and development, and then touching up the export, over the primitive "hand carved" approach that distances the actual esthetic and literary process of creating a book.

Oh, look, a windmill! 🙂

[Guest]

I think the book publishers have mixed feelings about ebooks, when they first came out they were seen as a threat to the publishing industry, print still accounts for the vast majority for book publishers ($22 billion vs $2 billion in the US last year).  I totally agree with what you are saying about the way ebooks should be designed, you don't make a real book with code, but to me it still looks like it's essential to have that knowledge at the moment

[Guest]

* still accounts for the vast majority OF book publishers REVENUE

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

EPUBs are much in step with web page development. Even after some 30 years, there still isn't a good visual web page designer. Half a dozen have come and gone, and none are mourned. As much as you can do visually in Dreamweaver, you still have to do a ton at the code level to get precise results, clean code and efficiency.

But I think EPUB could be closer to code-less creation. It's easy enough to do most of it using clean InDesign development, but the lack of alignment between ID layout and EPUB layout means the CSS step is still needed. Someone needs to write a plugin as comprehensive and capable as In5 for this. (Not me, I'm a mere hacker at the script/plugin level.)

[Guest]

I was techo-phobic before I started to learn how to build websites last year so I still have a massive amount to learn about the mechanics of it all, the issue of code-less creation is interesting though, I've actually made a note to check what CSS elements can be used in an ePub and it will be interesting to see how they tie in with InDesign's capabilities

[Guest]

also, I don't know if I will get any replies but I've emailed a few of the big publishers in the UK to ask them exactly what processes they go through to turn their print book files into ebooks. I will let you know if I get any interesting replies

[Guest]

Hi James, I bought your book on Kindle.  I've exported the first EPUB iteration in InDesign as you've instructed (with classes enabled and generate css checked).  I completely understand that the EPUB is like a ZIP file, I understand the basic structure of the files in the EPUB container and I have some understanding of the way they interelate with each other.  In your book it says I can open the EPUB file that InDesign has created similar to the way I would open a ZIP file with any archive utility but there doesn't seem to be any way of me opening it at all on my macbook?  Obviously, I can open up the book itself in iBooks but there's no way of me opening up the EPUB as I would a ZIP file.  Can you help?  Can you recommend something to open the EPUB on a macbook so I can look at that CSS file?  Thank you

[Guest]

I'm being given the option to compress/zip the EPUB that InDesign has exported but not decompress/unzip it! 

[BobLevine]

Change the file extension to ZIP.

[Guest]

thank you very much indeed Bob, I starting learning how to build websites last year and I'm continuing to learn steadily but I'm still very new to all this technology, so thanks

[Guest]

I can't unzip it, it says it is an unsupported format?

[Guest]

and if I can unzip it and make changes to those files, presumably I can turn it back into an EPUB again by just changing the file extension again?  That would be incredible if it worked like that, if I could do that? 

[BobLevine]

IIRC, this is more complicated on a Mac than it is on Windows. 

[Guest]

thank you for alerting me about the doctype change Bob