eBook Typography is in the iBooks Store

Image for eBook Typography is in the iBooks Store
Image for eBook Typography is in the iBooks Store

Yipee! My eBook eBook Typography for Flowable eBooks is now available on the iBooks store.

Going through the process of getting it validated and accepted was less problematic than I supposed, but there are one or two problems to explain which may help others.

furthermore...

eBook Typography - Chris Jennings

The first time I sent the eBook through to the iBooks store, the process hung for ages on the screen showing 'authenticating with iTunes Connect'. After 30 minutes I aborted and Googled the error. I got some clues from other reports of this but then discovered that you actually need to put in a print book price for each territory, even if you are only publishing as an eBook. In other words, this cannot be an empty field in the metadata. You need:

<physical_list_price>

Putting in approximate prices for each territory got me further into the process.

The next error was a bit baffling, because it seemed as if it was not happy with a PDF inside the ePub package. The error was:

"Unable to analyse: eBookTypography.pdf"

This is an image created from MindNode Pro - exported as a PDF. Now since another PDF in the ePUB was not causing an error, it could be that MindNode was doing something unusual to the PDF. I am please to report that by going back to MindNode and using Print to PDF rather than export to PDF seemed to do the trick! All then validated and I was able to get the book onto the iBooks stores in various territories.

Other Lessons Learnt

Sample

I simply used the automatic method to get a sample up onto the store. This means that iTunes builds a sample out of a number of early pages. The problem with this is that if you have a Table of Contents in the early pages, then this will show up in the sample and the links within that TOC will not be greyed out. This is less user friendly than I would like, so maybe creating a bespoke sample would be better.

Categories

The categories with the iBooks store does not directly relate to the categories that you can choose for your eBook. In fact there is no category for 'Publishing', but hopefully the categories chosen will improve the visibilty of the book.

Sample Book

When you submit your eBook to the Apple iBooks store, you can choose to create your own sample, or the submission process will generate a sample automatically.

One issue that I have noticed, is that the sample will ignore:

page-break-after:always;

Posted on 05 Sep around 8pm

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