Introduction

With the market for eBooks on the rise, the client looked for practical and cost-effective methods for converting titles with rich imagery and elaborate layout into digital formats.

They also wanted a team with a strong quality control team in place and the ability to perform the work on a smaller budget. The ePub format is based on an (x)html structure; organizing and handling its source code is very important in order to guarantee satisfactory interaction with the eBook.

Electronic books, and in particular ePub publications, are increasingly used to be read especially on mobile devices. As a result, people who have difficulties reading paper-printed books may have new opportunities, provided that the digital versions are accessible. which is particularly important for the visually impaired.

E-Pub Electronic Publication is the distribution and interchange format standard for digital publications and documents based on Web Standards. ePub defines a means of representing, packaging and encoding structured and semantically enhanced Web content — including XHTML, CSS, SVG, images, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file format.

Details

The ePub 3 format supports HTML elements like headings (H1-H6), ordered and unordered lists (such as ol, ul, li, dl, dd, dt), tables (table, th, td), images (img), blockquote and links. An E-Pub document can also be easily read by blind users via assistive technologies both through desktop and mobile platforms i.e., Voiceover-based devices). Furthermore, the E-Pub format is an open and free standard. The eBook in ePub format appears as a single file with a “.epub” extension.

Technically speaking, it is a compressed zip format archive containing a number of given files and folders. Some files describe the book content (file list, eBook structure, title.) The description files are XML files, while the text is marked up in XHTML. CSS is used to format the text. All these languages are open source and standard.

The Challenges

The client provided a non-editable PDF format and we have to convert it to E-Pub the text conversion is very bad as the PDF is of poor quality. The special characters and some texts were not retained while doing OCR and we have to do it manually. So, it was difficult as it had to be delivered in a short span of time.

The PDF documents contained text, graphs, images, and tables. Key requirements of the task were speed of delivery and the accuracy of the content.

Solution

As we try to manually correct the errors, it may result in causing errors and also it takes more time to complete the task. To overcome such difficulties in the text conversion process, we followed a semi-automation tool to improve file text accuracy and efficiency. Our team proofread the converted documents to ensure there were no errors. Corrections were made when needed. Once edited, the team converted the Word files to ePub format.

The documents were checked for quality throughout the process with our quality assurance team.

Results

Our team members were able to achieve their accuracy level benchmark. Once finished, the client was happy with our efforts in delivering the book with good quality within the turnaround time frame.

Also, the clients recommended our services to other clients as well.