How do ebooks work at all?

How Books Are Made

Would you believe that the entire ebook marketplace – including Kindle, iBooks, and thousands of ebook stores – depends on the volunteer work of about a dozen people?

There are millions of ebooks for sale online, and thousands more every day. How could any human bookseller check that they even work, and that they don’t contain malicious code? The ebook marketplace can only exist because there are rules for how an ebook is made, and an official, automatic way to check that it follows them.

The people who create those rules, called standards, are volunteers. Dave Cramer is one of them. He’s been contributing to web and ebook standards, making books, and designing software that makes books, for over thirty years, mostly at Hachette USA. He talks to Arthur about creating standards, how ebooks are made, using CSS for print layout, and the ongoing push and pull between digital-first and InDesign-based publishing.

Links from the show:

• ‘Wiring for Change’, Dave’s talk with Brian O’Leary at the BISG in March 2024
• The EPUB 3.3 specification
• EPUBCheck
• The W3C CSS Working Group
• Ace by DAISY, for checking epub accessibility
• Electric Book Works