An ePub doesn’t display the way a document does. The text reflows according to the screen and the reader’s preferences, so the page — in the sense a publisher means it — stops existing. From there on, everything that seemed simple has to be rethought.
And that’s only the half you can see.
Where it gets complicated
Reading
Font size, margins, justification, night mode: every preference changes where everything ends up. Referring to a point in the book needs a system that doesn’t depend on pagination, and that has to be decided at the start because it touches everything else.
Continuity
Readers start on their phone and continue on a tablet, and expect to find their place where they left it — along with their notes and highlights. Syncing a position in a text that reflows is harder than it sounds.
The catalogue
Titles, authors, covers, prices, availability: almost never your own data. It arrives from distributors, in formats with their own rules, and updates without anyone on your side doing anything.
Rights
A book can be sellable here and not there, now and not in six months, in one language and not another. Availability is a condition evaluated every time, not a switch flipped once and for all.
Access
Single purchase, subscription, timed loan, access granted by an institution: each has different rules for what happens when it expires. And the answer to «what does the user see now» depends on all of them together.
The proof
It’s the standard publishing uses to exchange information about titles — metadata, identifiers, prices, sale conditions, market availability. Distributors speak it, and anyone who wants to receive a real catalogue has to be able to read it.
We’ve implemented it in its current version. It isn’t something you do out of curiosity: you do it when a real publisher sends you their real catalogue, and that catalogue has to enter a system and stay up to date in it.
Before
A major publishing group tries a new format: serialised fiction, read on the phone, through its own app. The launch date is already set.
After
iOS and Android apps from a single codebase, and infrastructure that follows the load. Shipped on time, over ten thousand downloads, a 4.6 average rating.
Before
A children's publisher selling to readers and bookshops, with several imprints and titles in multiple formats. A shop that treated books like any other product, kept in line by hand.
After
E-commerce built around the catalogue: titles that arrive as ONIX and stay in sync on their own, formats and availability handled the way a publisher handles them, a dedicated access for bookshops.
Why it matters
A reading application is judged by opening it: what the typeface looks like, how fluid it is, whether it resembles the books you publish. Fair enough — it’s the part your readers touch.
But it’s also the part that can be redone. What can’t be redone is the structure underneath: how titles come in, how they update, what happens when a right expires or a price changes in a single market. Get that wrong, and the most beautiful application in the world shows a catalogue that’s no longer true.
The beautiful part can be redone in a month.
The part underneath can’t.
If the product doesn’t exist yet, the first useful question isn’t about the application: it’s where the content comes from and in what form — Build Plan. If it exists and the catalogue has become unmanageable, the door is Rescue.
If instead you already know what needs doing and want to see how we work before committing, there’s the Dry Run: two weeks, and it ends there.