- [Instructor] As I mentioned, you can create EPUB's
from InDesign quite easily.
And the EPUB format is a standard format that
E-resellers support and that you could use
to sell your Ebooks.
But one little bit of confusion happens with InDesign
because if you go to export to EPUB,
you have a couple choices that you have to
decide on right away.
Here I have the English Cottage Gardens book open.
And if I go to export to EPUB,
you simply go to File and choose Export,
or press command or control 'E'.
And you see that you actually have two choices for EPUB.
Reflowable and Fixed Layout.
Reflowable is the kind that we'll be focusing on
in this course.
I have other courses for Fixed Layout.
But because a lot of publications can go either way,
they might work in either format.
I wanted to spend just this one video in talking about
the differences between these two formats.
I've already exported both of these books out to EPUB.
One is fixed layout, one is reflowable.
I want to show you that this one that has animation
in the name is a book to which I've applied some animations
from the interactive panels in InDesign,
just to these two elements right here.
You can sort of see the little dots here
and the green line here.
These have animations applied.
And that's because an EPUB fixed layout book
can support a lot of interactivity because
it supports Java Script.
If you go under Window, and go out to Interactive,
there's a lot of these things that you can include
in a publication that if you export to fixed layout,
will be supported.
If you exported to reflowable, it would be ignored.
Or at least, only supported
on a very small number of devices.
Here in iBooks I have them both open.
Here's the same EPUB reflowable book that we looked at
in a different video.
Text can be selected, text can be searched.
The User can change the size of the type
because it reflows.
I could resize the window, all that would work the same.
But if we look at the fixed layout,
although the text can still be selected,
the way the InDesign exports it makes it a little stuttery.
Which is not really great.
You cannot change the size of the type.
However, if we go to Chapter 3, you can see a little bit
of animation happening with the picture
and the caption slides in.
And you can do all sorts of fun stuff with animation
and sound and video, in a fixed layout EPUB.
The problem though, is that this is hard to read
on a small device because you cannot change
the size of the type.
The type doesn't reflow, it's like a combination of a
.pdf and an EPUB.
Let's look at the differences between these.
In a reflowable EPUB, you have the widest distribution.
There's not a lot of support on the Kindle platform
for fixed layout EPUB's.
Only because the devices are smaller than iPad's.
Though that's changing.
And my friend, Kevin Callahan has a course in the
online library on creating
fixed layout Ebooks for the Kindle.
Though it really doesn't have a lot to do with InDesign.
It has more to do with .html and .css.
But for the widest distribution,
to be able to sell your Ebook,
in the Google Playbooks, in the iBookstore
and on the Kindle Store, you'd want it to be reflowable.
It fits all the different screen sizes.
Users can zoom into pictures and tables and things,
just by double-tapping.
It's the kind of format that they're most familiar with.
However it has a flat and linear design.
As we'll be talking about in this course.
If you have a highly designed book in InDesign,
exporting it to a reflowable EPUB, is akin to converting
it to a Word Document, with embedded pictures.
That is about as close as you can get to a book
in reflowable format.
Now with fixed layout, as I said,
it supports the design, it's like a print replica.
You can include interactivity,
you can even include read aloud.
Where you have a narration track and you can opt to have
the words light up as the narrator reads that.
That's not something that's built into InDesign,
but there are plug-ins that can help you with that.
Because it's fixed layout though,
it has a very limited distribution.
If you're pretty sure that your readers
are mostly on iOS devices
then that should be fine,
as long as they're on larger screens.
And the Users cannot customize the reading experience.
They can't change the type face or
make it larger or smaller, which can frustrate Users.
Here's an example of the same Ebook that's seen
on an iPad screen and seen on a iPhone screen,
you can see how tiny it is and the User would have to
constantly be pinching and zooming to see what it says.
So the best fit for reflowable formats are generally,
trade books, reference material that's text heavy.
Journals, things like that.
The best fit for fixed layout format are usually
kids books, picture books, comic books and graphic novels.
Photo essays, textbooks especially with lots of images
and diagrams where you can't really linearize it into
a Word Document look alike.
It really has to look more like a .pdf,
then the answer is, create a fixed layout EPUB.
There are some publications that could go either way.
Like cookbooks, you can redesign for a linear design.
Same thing with brochures and travel guides.
If you want to learn more about creating fixed layout
EPUB's and the difference between fixed layout
and reflowable, again let me direct you to my course
Ebook Foundations where I look closely at both formats
and also my dedicated course here,
called Creating Fixed-Layout EPUBs from InDesign.