When we export our book to the reflowable ePub from InDesign, we have a choice about the content order. Usually we choose 'Based on Page Layout', but if you want to make sure that your front matter pages don't end up at the back of the book, then you need to use the Articles Panel to organise the content.

Once we have exported the reflowable ePub from InDesign we can edit the CSS. First we need to unpack the ePub file and use a text editor to edit the main CSS file.The objective is to get out own version of the CSS file so that we can use this later when we re-export from InDesign.This screencast uses Textwangler to edit the ePub. Look back through the screencasts and you can see how we can use Dreamweaver to do something very similar.We edit the CS to add a background to a heading and remove the forced page break that is generating a blank page.

I am slowly working on a project to construct a publishing system that uses a web first interface to provide an editing environment which then leads to XML that can then be exported ready to be imported into a ready prepared InDesign template.This screencast demonstrates the building of an international recipe book with contributions from various editors.

Edit: Please note that Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite is NO longer an option since this has now been replaced by a different product.Here is a big decision.You want to turn Shakespeare's Play A Midsummer Night's Dream into a fancy digital product for the iPad (and other tablet devices possibly).What are the choices?Let's have a look at some different versions on the iPad.I provide a table below the screencast with the various options explained.

There is no direct way to get your content out of InDesign and into iBooks Author.[edit] Please note that as of iBooks Author 2.2 you can insert chapters from an IDML file that has been exported from InDesignWhat we have to do is to make use of a number of scripts added to InDesign to break down a single document into separated files and then extract the text. Lucky for us, iBooks Author can build a chapter from a Microsoft Word document and will even respect the styles built in Indesign!

iBooks Author is Apple's free software for creating eBooks for their own iBooks reader software for the iPad and iBooks on the MAC (Mavericks only).The software is very easy to use but does have some limitations and tries (nay encourages you), to use an existing template for your design and layout. Once you understand how you can modify a template for your own purposes then a great deal of flexibility is available to you.

We look at our Shakespeare play (A Midsummer Night's Dream), built with iBooks Author and proofed on the iPad and iBooks on the MAC.This is a partially complete work, but gives us an opportunity to show the structure and modes of viewing the eBook. This screencast serves as an introduction to iBooks Author, the free software from Apple. The next episode shows how the Shakespeare play appears in the authoring environment, before we then explore how to build a template for a Shakespeare play.Please note that since this Screencast iBooks Author no longer refers to a Portrait View, but rather a scrolling view which can be invoked in either landscape or portrait view on the iPad with iBooks.

In the previous part, we added a master page header to to every page and used this to split the ePub.Now we are unpacking the ePub and after creating a local Dreamweaver site, we edit the various files inside the ePub package.Note that I am using a MAC with the latest OS (Mavericks) to do this work. This makes life easier since I can view the ePub file with Apple's iBooks app.If you are working with a PC/Windows, then you can test the ePub with Readium within the Google Chrome browser.Addendum: To make sure that the header (originally only on the master pages), will appear above the main text, make the header text box very wide so that it is the first item reading left to right. The articles will then put things in the correct order reading from top left.

We start with a Shakespeare play (Midsummer Night's Dream) set up in InDesign with pages good for print and previously exported as a reflowable ePub3.  We make use of master page items to split the document into separate HTML documents and use the Articles panel to order the content on export to ePub.The next part of this screencast will cover editing the insides of the ePub package so that it will conform to the ePub3 Fixed-Layout format.

I walk through the issues when creating eBooks.

Can you embed fonts?

What Space is available?

What is the Page?

Special Effects

and more