Dev8D: ebooks workshop, Anthony Levings

Feb 16, 2012 by michelle-pauli

Anthony Levings is the managing director and editor of academic publisher Gylphi and led a two hour workshop on creating ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats.

In a very focused session, the sense of concentration in the room was palpable as attendees downloaded the software they needed from a memory stick and then got stuck into the ebook process from start to finish. Anthony ran through the various software options, from InDesign, Sigil and Calibre to iBooks Author (you can find more about these, and links for downloads on the workshop wiki entry), discussed styling for both ePub and Kindle and the issues between the two, and also covered metadata and covers. He recommended a book (an actual printed book!), Elizabeth Castro’s EPUB: Straight to the Point (Peachpit Press) for those who want to delve more deeply, and following the hashtag #eprdctn.

Read on for his thoughts on the session, and Dev8D more generally.

What’s brought you to Dev8D?

I think I saw it tweeted and thought wow that looks like a good opportunity to learn about these technologies. It’s my first time here – I’ve been dragged into tech from a publishing background! I think it’s what I expected, probably on the extreme end of people taking files round and installing databases etc on the fly. I wasn’t expecting quite so much hands-on coding. I’ve been here for the three days and I’ve tended to stick to the core sessions.

What’s your workshop about?

It’s an overview of the technologies available for the creation of eBooks in EPUB and Kindle formats.

What do you hope people will have taken away from it?

I hope they will have taken a willingness to start working with the technology and, given the tone of the conference, that they will want to do creative things with getting things into these formats to use and coming up with ways of repurposing it and have found that it’s not such a big effort to commit to learning the tech. I didn’t know what to expect! I just hoped that people would come along… I wasn’t planning to present but then Mahendra sent round an email beforehand asking for more sessions and I replied and said that I could present on this if needed. I’m pleased that I did, it’s nice to have done it.

What have you taken away from your workshop in particular and Dev8D in general?

From Dev8d in general I’ve taken away the awareness that there’s a lot of interest in getting data in and out of people’s systems, like Pearson with their API, and lots of very API-based interest in how to get and share and format data. My workshop was more about packaging data and selling it in a packaged form but it’s given me an awareness of what I need to think about for future needs.

From this workshop I was expecting people to ask about pricing and about ebooks. I was expecting more animosity than I received about those elements because Dev8D has been so much about the freeflow of information and with the tech community there is such an open source ethic whereas my talk was about packaging and production values and making things that people want to read and feel comfortable reading which probably matter more in arts and humanities, which is my background, then in technology.