Does the hottest e-book also need packaging design

Does e-book also need packaging design

some people think that ebookd design is a loose statement. Do ebooks need to be designed like paper books? What are the similarities and fundamental differences between the two? Joel fried lander is a leader in the field of Self Publishing and the first person to promote best practices in the field of e-book design. He is also a prolific blogger and writer. This article is the main content of his recent interview

there are many binding designers, who only pay attention to the binding design of paper books. Is this a good attitude

many of these designers are well-trained professionals, which have been honed in their practical work of binding design for offset printing for many years. Since designers now start their careers with a large number of page images and HTML data (the same kind of coding data necessary for making e-books), they don't need to go through too many transitional adaptation periods

although the e-book business is growing rapidly, and many early recipients of digital reading still have unlimited enthusiasm for the progressive development of digital reading, in my opinion, paper books still have strong vitality. Reading the paper version and the digital version are really two different experiences, and I'm not sure that people will have the same preferences for these two forms. In addition, today's simple e-book products are the most competitive book products in many types of books. Compared with the software and hardware we currently use, we will have higher requirements for the performance of the software and hardware that support the operation of e-books, in order to make the synthetic books with good format easier to run

some people will think that e-book design is a contradictory rhetoric, and there is a contradiction between its internal and external. In terms of its core elements, book design is layout design, because almost all the contents inside the book have a fixed layout

layout design depends on the selection of appropriate fonts and their reasonable layout according to some principles formed in the development history of more than 500 years of paper books

the cover design of the e-book seems to be very simple. To design the cover, you only need to find a document in JPEG format. In fact, is this so easy? Or do authors need to see this as a bigger challenge

well, it's like this. The question is, what is the JPEG document so far? This is what makes the problem difficult. The first reaction should be to simply copy the cover of a paper book. In many cases, this practice has completely buried many extremely high-quality e-books, because it will return a completely useless and unreadable graphic data in the search results of e-book retailers. In my opinion, this is by no means a wise decision. It completely ignores the potential of this design form pointed out by sun Dongquan, Deputy Secretary General of the new China Plastics Processing Industry Association and Secretary General of the battery diaphragm special committee of the China Plastics Association. Take a look at the cases in the ebook cover design awards that I publish in my blog every month, and you will understand what I mean by these words

How would you describe the difference between paper book design and e-book design

the main difference between paper book design and e-book design is persistence

a paper book will always exist in a fixed form, so it encourages refined design, and attaches great importance to the design process and its presentation form. In other words, if you know that your book will exist for a long time, and everything you put into it will be fixed and unchangeable from the design point of view, then you will pay more attention to the detailed design. You may conceive a design plan, and then gradually change it. After dozens of repeated revisions, you will feel that the appearance and feeling of this book are completely right. And the time and energy invested will be rewarded, because even after a few years, the book will still be presented in exactly the same form

③ high temperature air may trigger a fire alarm. As far as the design of most e-books is concerned, there is no so-called durability of design. Apart from the opening of the chapter and the general arrangement of the text itself, only a few elements are under the control of the designer. Although many excellent designers have designed many beautiful e-books, most of which are read on iPad, only a small part of them have been published, and these published e-books are usually not representative in e-book design. They are not durable, so the power of thinking and adjusting design ideas no longer exists. I think this is one of the reasons why many e-books look so bad nowadays

in the digital age, books themselves are evolving. Should this evolution also include book design to some extent? What is your prediction about this

the terms we use will change with the evolution of books, won't they? We are entering an era when it is difficult to define digital books. It is easy to give such a definition when we are only converting paper books into their digital format

but more and more authors begin to publish digital books directly. When you start choosing such a publishing path, how do you distinguish between your texts? How can one text be called a book, while another is regarded as an article, a novella, a short story, or a long article

book design has also undergone evolution in the past few hundred years. In this process, it has become a predictable convention in the subconscious of readers. It provides readers with book guidance and finds the author's point of view. I don't think we should throw away all these old things just because we have new things to play with

e-book covers are not part of books. It is presented by the area of the reading screen. Will this be a disadvantage or an opportunity

this is also a form of packaging, which is the same as the cover of paper books or the cover of hardcover books

if you start with a small digital space containing only the book title content and the author's name information, you have a key element in the cover. But what next? The value of your book cover depends on what you attach to it later. For example, if you want to add a message, an illustration, an official recommendation, a photo of the author, a series of listed points on the cover, or a combination of any of the above, then you enter the category of commodity promotion design

for those books that are intended to be sold in the open market, their book covers should mainly be the extension of the market concept behind the book. In this regard, there is no difference between paper book design and e-book design

these elements you add can help you attract visitors to stop and read the book more carefully. These elements can reveal that six kinds of plastic packaging materials in some books can significantly reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, which can reflect the style or tone of the book, or the author's point of view. The target group of this work can also list more reasons for buyers to buy the book

because the design space of the book cover of e-books is very limited, all these tasks become more difficult for e-books. The best advice I can give is to choose oneortwo goals for the desired effect of your book cover, and then focus on achieving these goals

if you first hope that readers can immediately identify your book type after seeing the book cover, like which type of novel writer you are, then take this as the goal. If your book is a teaching book, focus on highlighting the authority of the author and the information that readers can learn from the book