Laniakea Books Handbook

Book production

1. Acquire book text in any form.
   • title
   • subtitle
   • blurb
   • author bio
2. Decide book dimensions
3. Typeset book
   • Affinity Publisher / Adobe InDesign
   • TeX / Tectonic
   • typst
4. Decide paper gsm and calculate spine width
5. Design cover
   • front
   • back
   • insides
   • spine
6. Decide number of copies
7. Get quotes from printers
8. Decide retail price
9. Issue and assign ISBN
   • https://www.nielsenisbnstore.com/
10. Generate EAN-13 ISBN barcode with zint
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Article_Number
    • https://github.com/zint/zint
11. Supply book data
    • https://www.nielsentitleeditor.com/
12. Produce HTML files and create epub
13. Validate epub using epubcheck
    • https://github.com/w3c/epubcheck
14. Add book files on website

Coding practices

• All our code is licensed under MIT.
• All book assets are stored inside dedicated repositories with the prefix book- inside our GitHub org.
• We aim to maintain a minimal set of dependencies across our work.

TeX

• We use the tectonic distribution of TeX.
  • Tectonic is a XeTeX distribution, which brings some kind of limitations.

EPUB

• We follow the EPUB 3.3 specification.
• We compile using Zip 3.0 (July 5th 2008), by Info-ZIP, bundled with macOS.
  • With -X attribute: Do not save extra file attributes (Extended Attributes on OS/2, uid/gid and file times on Unix).
• We validate using epubcheck.
  • https://github.com/w3c/epubcheck