As for the two non-PDF ebook formats we offered, the market was tiny, since few people had, or used, ebook readers.Īs a result, we focused the bulk of our energies on producing our PDFs in-house and delegated the production of the other versions of our ebooks to our reselling partner O’Reilly Media.
This was far from surprising: the print-on-demand books cost significantly more than the PDF versions and took longer for customers to obtain than the downloadable PDF versions. But, for the vast majority of our readers, PDF continued to be the format of choice. Within a few years, though, we started offering print-on-demand versions (generated from the PDFs, run through Apago’s PDF Enhancer to shrink them to an appropriate physical trim size), and in late 2009 we even started publishing most of our titles in two other ebook formats, EPUB and Mobipocket. The Way it Was - In those early days of the series, PDF was (as it remains) the primary format for published Take Control books. Word’s advanced table-formatting features were especially useful, and tables were used to create grids for eye-catching visual elements such as figures and highlighted tips.
That is, they could write directly into their layout, thus eliminating extra production time that would otherwise be needed to flow their final words into the final layout.
Word offered a plethora and a half of formatting features, which meant that our authors could, with a little guidance, produce manuscripts that were close in appearance to the final PDF file that we distributed.
That said, Tonya did use Word on the Mac to export a PDF that she then swapped in to replace the visible layer of the somewhat ugly Windows-generated PDF, thus gaining the links and bookmarks from the Windows version and the better-looking PDF from the Mac version.)Īlso, Word had long been a de facto standard in the book publishing world, which meant that all Take Control authors owned it and knew how to use it. And, yes, there is more than a little irony that the Mac-focused Take Control series was exported to PDF with Windows software - until earlier this year when we switched away from authoring in Word. (Regrettably, the Mac versions of Word are, to this day, unable to generate a PDF with links and bookmarks. Back then, PDF was the only widely used ebook standard, and for an “ebook-first” series, hot links and bookmarks were (and still are) required. Word was an obvious choice: Tonya, who created the first template, was an agile user of Word’s advanced features, and she knew that there was an Adobe Acrobat Pro plug-in for Word for Windows 2003 that would enable her to export PDFs that included clickable Web URLs, internal links, and bookmarks - that is, so long as the authors created the manuscripts to spec. In those early days, the authors of Take Control books prepared their manuscripts in Microsoft Word X on the Mac. It was possible to print them, of course, but they were really designed for reading onscreen. It was to be an “ebook-first” series, meaning that the manuscripts were written and formatted right from the start with the idea that they would be read as ebooks.
#1590: Demystifying USB-C cables, Apple sues spyware firm, Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking, printer driver quirks, support TidBITS!Ī long, long time ago (to be precise, in 2003), Adam and Tonya Engst conceived the Take Control series.#1591: Major OS updates, AirPods firmware update, non-Google accounts in Gmail app, Time Sensitive notifications, Apple Watch Web browser.
#1592: Life with HomeKit, notification summaries, Music/iTunes Store oddity, inadvertent Mail deletion, iOS update error, holiday hiatus.#1593: Wordle, vinyl skins for Apple laptops, Apple Music Voice Plan, ad hoc Wi-Fi networks.#1594: iOS 15.2.1, AirTag stalking, CES Tech Trends for 2022.