ebooks

Interactive PDF ebook for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is a not‐for profit organisation publishing social reports. JRF’s priority is to inform and for this reason they wanted a format that would be accessible by the greatest number of readers and platforms. Their first generation of ebooks had been created as reflowable PDF ebooks converted from Word documents, which greatly limited the interactive elements that could be added in the future. JRF’s longterm goal is to produce enhanced ebooks, so they asked CPM to develop the second generation of interactive PDF ebooks.

The range of functionalities that can be added to ebooks is almost limitless so when developing a digital publication what matters is the audience, where they read ebooks, what the purpose of the publication is and what devices to optimise it for.

JRF knew that their readership uses mostly iPads, iPhones and Kindles so they didn’t want EPUB ebooks that can’t be read on the Kindle nor have so many sophisticated features that they would be virtually unusable on devices that didn’t support them. For that reason, we converted the reports directly from InDesign, which offers more long‐term potential.

Adapting the content was a fascinating process. What makes sense for a print publication doesn’t always work for a digital product. Ease of navigation, not unlike on a website, is crucial. Furthermore, as the Kindle doesn’t have touch‐screen technology we had to devise ‘journeys’ that would work as well with and without it. JRF’s reports also have many coloured graphics so we had to ensure that these worked equally well in greyscale on the Kindle.

Scope of the project:
Adjusting position and size of tables, diagrams, charts and boxes; creating hyperlinks to internal crossreferences and external websites; testing on a variety of devices.