Publishing guide for books – digital & print

We publish books both digitally (website, ebook, PDF) and in print format. Generally we start from the digital side (e.g. a text from the Marxists Internet Archive or a Word document) and end up with a printed book. 'Intermediate' formats like ebook and PDF can be useful too and there is a lot of cross-over between the various formats. Once you are familiar with the processes involved, it is fairly easy to generate all formats in relatively little time.

The goal is to document the various workflows involved in order to:

• Cut down the time to get to whatever format we want (EPUB/PDF/HTML/InDesign file)
• Ensure consistency and improve overall quality

An ebook (epub file) is essentially a collection of HTML files, so once you have the epub file, you also have the HTML code. If you need all digital formats, the preferred workflow is to first create the ebook using the Sigil and Calibre software, and convert to HTML and PDF afterwards. Ebook

There are several ways to produce an ebook, but all of them generally fall under either of the following two methods:

Starting from scratch, when you only have the final proofread Word documents available Starting from an epub export generated by desktop publishing software such as InDesign (quickest and preferred method)

For both you will need Sigil (https://sigil-ebook.com/) and Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/), and a basic knowledge of HTML is required. Adobe Digital Editions is useful for checking the end result: https://www.adobe.com/solutions/ebook/digital-editions/download.html