It’s been a long road, but I’m happy to report that the ebook version of Complete Digital Photography is almost here. Today, I finished the final merge of the ebook: text and images are in their proper location, and the book passed its first validation test. It will take a week or two of device testing, CSS tweaking, and image checking to finish up.
One of the things that has made this process so labor-intensive is that an ebook doesn’t really have the same concept of a ‘page’ as found in a printed book; it’s closer in design to a web page. For a book largely made up of text, this isn’t too big a deal, but CDP’s volume of images meant that nearly every image had to be formatted for the ebook.
We feel good about what we’ve created. CDP9 uses the book’s fonts, and, like any other reflowable ebook, you can resize the text or change it to one of your preferred fonts. Tapping an image will open it full-screen, and it should look good at that size. And, the index in the back of the book is fully linked to the text, helpful for digging into into a subject that is referenced in different places throughout the book.
Blah, blah, blah–when will it be available?
We are hoping to upload the final version to Amazon and Apple for distribution in early May (we’ll be looking at alternative choices after launch). We’re still working on pricing, and won’t be able to announce that until we’ve worked through the specifics of different online stores. (I can tell you that it will be under $40.)
Below are some screen shots of current pages in the book, from an iPad and from Apple’s Books app; just click on one of them to see the gallery. We’ll have more information in a couple of weeks, after we’ve submitted the final book.
