Have you ever had a poor reading experience with books you purchased from Amazon or other retailers? I myself have, many times!
We can spend hours discussing the technological fragmentation and inefficiencies of the current publishing landscape — the Amazon walled garden, the Apple EPub specific rules or even the futility of the EPUB3 standard — but, at the end of the day, the point is readers have to deal with tons of low-quality, mediocre and bad-designed books.
I’m talking about digital books here and I will extend the discussion on paper books in a future post.
The problem is that publishers pursue a cheap solution instead of quality, and this is a problem if you don’t have or don’t use the right pieces of technology and algorithm.
Where we come from
As a matter of fact, I’ve been wanting to create better books from the moment I started working at StreetLib, about 8 years ago. At that time, the name of our company was “Simplicissimus Book Farm”: we were among the few digital publishing evangelists in the world, especially in Europe, we were actually strongly suggesting to publishers to “digitize” their books and I was one of those guys working on this challenging process.
At the time, the digital book production process was really a handcrafted work, and it was both fascinating and pretty tough!
Tough because we had to deal with super fancy publishers’ expectations, a shaky publishing landscape, tons of hand work to implement custom-tailored HTML code inside the books, and many unreliable tools to validate and deliver the final content.
More here
