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Why converting the Heart of Empire Directors Cut into an ebook is driving me mad...
The Heart of Empire Directors Cut is one of my proudest acheivements. (and in the proud tradition of all online content creators - the first chapter of Heart of Empire Directors Cut is online to read for free.)
18 months of working almost every evening and weekend with Bryan produced the "Directors Cut" of Heart of Empire: answering every possible question from "where do you get your ideas from?" to "what are your influences?" to "what the heck is the golden proportion" . It got rave reviews and continues to be used in courses on how to write and draw comics.
Now that the CD medium is dying I want to try and convert it into an ebook, and because of the content of the CD and the way it is laid out I am having a lot of problems: hence this post to try and explain them... - every time I have tried to explain the requirements in the past via text I have failed miserably. (although I seem to do OK when talking in person - probably as then my hands are free to gesticulate!)
The basic problem is this: all ebooks (and most significantly all ebook authoring software) create ebooks that are simply linear: you go from page 1 to page 2 to page 3 and so on until you have finished. The CD is very different to this: the basic premise is that you are able to see each page in each stage of creation, so you have page 1 in pencils - then page 1 in inks then page 1 in final colour version - and then page 1 in very high resolution, and then page 1's annotations.
So you can read in the normal way: page 1 pencils page to page 2 pencils to page 3 pencils: but from every page you can go straight to its relevant inks, colours or notes page: so from page 3 pencils you could got to page 3 inks, page 3 colours, page 3 notes - or indeed page 2 pencils or page 4 pencils. With any luck this image will explain it in enough detail to be understandable.
(on a side note, I created it as flat HTML project: no database - nothing requiring anything more than a browser capable of reading HTML files is needed to read it: this meant it was very labourious to create - there are over a quarter of a million links in it! - but also very technology and future proof: everybody who has ever put it into a computer can read it no problem.)
So now that the CD-Rom is a dying medium, how on Earth do I convert this into an ebook? - does the ebook creation software exist to handle this "matrix" style layout? - and if it does, would ebook readers be able to handle it? - or should I just give up and redo it from the ground up?
I have been looking into this problem for a couple of years now - and so far no one has ever been able to provide a solution. If you have any ideas - please let me know!
James Robertson, Bryan Talbot fanpage webmaster
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