Creating Fixed-Layout eBooks

Often referred to as "children's ebooks," "picture ebooks," "photo books," and similar monikers, fixed-layout ebooks are visually-rich layouts that offer much more than standard EPUB and KF8 format ebooks for iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Kindle Fire, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, and more. 


Fixed-layout ebooks behave very much like PDFs or even digital magazines, displaying the design, typography, and page geometry exactly as designed on all devices. This specialty type of ebook tends to be very reliant on imagery, either or both as inline graphics or page background images, and sometimes even as spread-spanning images. They support advanced typographic control and pixel-precise layout, and they can contain read-a-long, on-demand, or ambient audio. Limited interactivity may also be achieved through JavaScript integration. Objects can be placed anywhere on the page, aligned relative to one another, with absolute precision, and type control goes far beyond standard, flowable EPUB in the forms of support for any font (with embedding), accurate line wrapping, hyphenation, leading control, tracking (letter spacing), and even multiple columns. Fixed-layout EPUBs may have real sidebars, note or tip boxes, and live text image captions. And, like flowable EPUBs, all the text—even in such special features—is searchable, live text.


All of these features make fixed-layout ebooks ideal for such projects as children’s books, cookbooks, travel journals, photography and design books, game guides, and any other project where page presentation is important to reader experience and sales.



ePublishing with InDesign: Creating Fixed-Layout eBooks will teach you:

Understanding Fixed-Layout eBooks

Planning a Fixed-Layout eBook

Creating Fixed-Layout in InDesign

Adapting the HTML

Editing the CSS

Adding Advanced Features

Creating Read Aloud Narration

Creating Fixed-Layout for Kindle

Converting Fixed-Layout for Nook

Creating Fixed-Layout for Sony Reader

Creating Fixed-Layout for Kobo

Other Fixed-Layout Creation Tools


Creating Fixed-Layout eBooks by Pariah S. Burke is a companion to ePublishing with InDesign CS6 by Pariah S. Burke (ISBN: 9781118305591, Dec. 2012, Sybex), which is a prerequisite title, and is part of the ePublishing with InDesign series of books, videos, and instructor materials.