Towards Commercial eBook Production in Small Publishing Houses

In this paper we present the rationale behind e|ditor, a tool for online edition of digital contents aimed to small publishing houses. Its goal is to provide them with a user-friendly tool for creating (autonomously and at a commercially viable cost) a wide variety of device-independent enhanced e-books, including pocketbooks, pop-up e-books, school textbooks and extracurricular activities e-books. E|ditor is content-centric, focused in the content creation process. The standard export formats currently supported are EPUB (specially indicated for pocketbooks), SCORM (for LMSs) and HTML5 (for more powerful contents, aiming specially to school textbooks). This provides publishing houses with an appropriate spectrum of formats to cover a wide range of e-book types. This paper describes the main requirements of e|ditor and the design decisions taken to guarantee platformindependence and content reusability whereas providing a general purpose enhanced e-book creation tool.