I guess Barnes & Noble doesn't want the book I'm working on. I'm doing a book that will involve reproducing several Supreme Court decisions, which will total between 400 and 500 pages just reproducing for the decisions. Because of the way Supreme Court decisions are cited (case number and then page), in order for the book to be useful as a reference I need to maintain the pagination of the decisions as they appear in the official recored. Since the official decisions are in PDF format for download, that's not a problem. However, I didn't see any way on the Barnes & Noble Press site to do a fixed layout e-book, so I submitted an inquiry. I received their response today (Friday). They don't do fixed layout. So much for that. It looks like I'll be able to do fixed layout through Amazon if I do it as a textbook, but that doesn't get me an EPUB edition. Does anyone know if any other e-book services will do books in fixed layout?
I’ve been following this dilemma of yours. Any chance you can transform the PDFs into images, then you can use a photo album type of ebook?
I'm not sure. I think to retain any sort of legible resolution in the images, the files sizes would have to be rather huge. It may be that this book isn't going to be issued in an EPUB edition. When it's ready, I'll try KDP's textbook process and see if Amazon will do it. Ironically, the print version is going to be easy, thanks to the Supreme Court. It transpires that their standard page size is something like 6-1/8" x 9-1/4". 6 x 9 is a very standard trim size, so reproducing the court decisions at that size basically amounts to reducing the page size less than 5 percent. That's not enough to make any difference, since the Supreme Court uses 12-point type, so maintaining the pagination will be easy. If there's demand for an EPUB version down the road, I suppose I can investigate the professional services that convert PDFs to EPUB for a fee.
