How eBook conversion flows; a comprehensive look

With the digital era, came the need to transform the way books, bills and the other reading

materials were read and utilized. Before hiring a comprehensive eBook conversion services

provider in India, there are certain pivotal points that you should be acquainted with.

How does a typical company offering eBook conversion services proceed?

The process is a lengthy one and it has to be carried out with enough precision and care. Not

paying attention to even the trivial aspects can land the entire process in serious jeopardy.

Step #1: Obtaining the Source Document

A publisher in need of getting his/her publication transformed into an ePub ebook format would

submit the books in any of the following ways.

Hard-copy Books: The pages of books are scanned, cleaned using Optical Character

Recognition process and then edited by a human editor before supplied for eBook conversion.

Print-ready PDF: Being the best format for electronic book conversion, this is made with the

page-layout software—Adobe InDesign.

Original layout files: These files are produced with page layout programs such Adobe

FrameMaker, Adobe InDesign or Quark Express.

Once the eBook conversion services provider gets source files in any of the formats such as

original layout files, print-ready PDF or scanned pages of the books, they begin the conversion

process.

Step #2: Extraction

This is where elements such as texts, images, layouts and other details from the source file are

extracted. This is the most time consuming step as it determines the quality of the book.

Depending upon the style and requirements of the publishers' content types, extraction tools will

be tweaked to provide custom solutions for the clients.

Step #3: Mark up

In order to tag the content and structure (and meaning of the content, at times), before the

conversion is done, the extracted raw content is marked up with the aid of a special markup

language. Mark-up languages are brought into play so that computers can read the tags to

understand the content, since they cannot understand a page from the way it appears. For this

either eXtensible Markup Language (XML) or HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is used.

HTML: The web Kindle and EPUB eBooks utilize the power of HTML. The language

describes the content of a page using various tags such as title, article, aside, and paragraph and

these tags are readable by the web and computers.

XML: While HTML uses a fixed number of tags, XML is extensible to add as many tags as

required. This powers the language to not only interpret the content, but also its meaning and the

structure. Hence it is also called as semantic markup.

Step #4: Transform

The marked up files is converted into the desired format at this stage with the help of a program

known as transformation engine. If considerable changes are made at the previous stage, multiple

outputs can be made now or in the future as technology advances.

Step #5: Output

The most common output obtained are EPUBebooks, Kindle and PDF.

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