The landscape of eBook creation continues to evolve with advancing technologies and reader preferences. Here are some good practices to adapt and introduce in your ebook creation process:
- Mobile-friendly design: with the increasing use of smartphones and tablets for reading, prioritise a mobile-friendly design. Ensure that your eBook layout and typography adapt well to smaller screens and touch interactions.
- Responsive layouts: use responsive design techniques to ensure that your eBook content adjusts fluidly to different screen sizes and orientations. This allows for a seamless reading experience across various devices.
- Enhanced ebook features: explore integrating interactive elements, such as audio, video, animations, or interactive quizzes, to enhance reader engagement. These features can provide a more immersive and dynamic reading experience.
- Clean design: focus on clean and uncluttered layouts. Use ample white space, clear typography, and minimal distractions to enhance readability and visual appeal. Ensure your text is easily readable and can “breathe”.
- Customizable reading experience: provide readers with options to customise their reading experience. Offer adjustable font sizes, styles, colour themes, and day and night modes to cater to individual preferences.
- Accessibility compliance: ensure that your ebook meets accessibility guidelines and standards, such as WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). Pay attention to factors like colour contrast, alternative text for images, and logical content structure for screen reader compatibility.
- Streamlined navigation: implement intuitive navigation features that allow readers to navigate between chapters, sections, or specific pages easily. Incorporate clickable table of contents, bookmarks, and search functionality for quick access to content.
- Social sharing and collaboration: enable readers to share excerpts, quotes, or feedback on social media platforms directly from within the ebook.
- Cross-platform compatibility: create ebooks in standard formats like EPUB that are compatible with a wide range of eReader devices and applications. This ensures broader accessibility and reach for your eBook.
- Regular updates and improvements: stay updated with the latest ebook creation tools, technologies, and industry standards. Continuously improve your eBooks by incorporating user feedback, addressing issues, and adapting to emerging trends.
As the eBook landscape evolves, it is crucial to keep up with emerging trends, reader expectations, and technological advancements. We hope that these good practices will help you create ebooks that are visually appealing, engaging, accessible, and optimised for the diverse reading habits of your users.
While we cannot claim to know all the ebooks created, we highly recommend exploring the POEME and Bibliodos ebook collections for various engaging titles. Ebooks in the POEME collection explore the subjects of cultural heritage in France, Greece, Portugal and Belgium, while ebooks in the Bibliodos collection present the classics of European literature in an accessible, easy-to-understand way. Ebooks in these collections have been created to be inclusive and easily understandable for teenagers and adults. POEME ebooks can also be freely downloaded from the project’s website.