Episode 61: The Role of Fixed-Layout EPUBs in Publishing with Ken Jones

Ken Jones is an experienced book publishing software expert. Before founding Circular Software, he served as the Technical Production Manager, software trainer, and automation developer at Penguin. Circular Software is a UK company that specializes in software, training, and strategic guidance for publishers—including Quarto Group, Bonnier Books, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Pan Macmillan—helping them get the most from their print and digital workflows.

Ken joined us on the Booksmarts Podcast to discuss the role of fixed-layout EPUBs in modern publishing exploring how they differ from reflowable ebooks and PDFs, along with their design, content, and accessibility considerations. During the conversation, he referenced a recent Circular Software article on Groundbreaking No-Code Accessibility for Fixed-Layout EPUB, which highlights how the company helped Pottermore Publishing achieve top quality accessibility standards.

He also recommended Canva’s Affinity Studio as a free alternative to Adobe—a highly valuable resource for publishers that can accommodate ebook capabilities.

To learn more about Circular Software, visit their website.

Digital Transcript

Joshua Tallent
On this episode of the book smarts podcast, I’m speaking with Ken Jones. Ken is the founder of Circular Software. He’s an experienced book publishing software expert. He was the technical production manager and software trainer and automation developer at Penguin Random House. Well, I guess it was probably just penguin back then, before founding circular. Circular is a company that helps offer software and training and advice to publishers in the eBook space, helping them get the most out of their print and digital workflows. So Ken, thanks for joining me today.

Ken Jones
Well, thanks for having me. Yes, it was the Random House thing was going through about the time that I made the move, 10 years ago now,

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, you’ve been around the block. You’ve been part of the around the ebook block. For sure, you and I have, I mean, man, back in the day, back in the early ebook days, I remember seeing presentations that you would give at conferences and talking about fixed layout ebooks and all the cool stuff you’re doing. So we’re going to talk about ebooks today, which for me, is fun, because I don’t get to talk about ebooks all the time. I usually end up being the metadata guy and talking about all the data stuff. But we want to talk about ebooks, and specifically about the differences between fixed layout and and PDF format. So fixed layout ePub versus PDF, before we dive into like, the advantages of that, which I do want to talk about. Can you just explain, for anybody that’s listening, what’s the difference between a regular ePub file and a fixed layout ePub file? Kind of a little bit, a little bit, the non technical answer for people who may not really know,

Ken Jones
Yeah, most people, if you say ebook, will think of a black and white text thing that is on a Kindle, or something like that that is totally reflowable. And that is because that is the most common type of ebook. But as soon as you talk about EPUB, just at the time that I got interested really in ePub, fixed layout was the second type of EPUB. So there is two types of EPUB, the refillable one and the fixed layout version. So it’s been around for, I think, oh, over 10 years, 2014, I think doubting the iPad came out right? It was exactly iPad. So I was at Penguin, and they showed us, because Apple pushed the the idea and the format, really, and they were showing this thing, and I was like that that is, you know, that’s much better, much more pleasing to the eye. I really like illustrated books, so, you know, photography and annotated, you know, complex design, obviously beautiful illustrations for children’s books, etc, or cookery or DIY, all of the sort of where the format really lends itself to a large, large format, large page with lots of beautiful illustrations and Text combined. So that’s what fixed layout offers us a way to have an ebook version of a well designed page. So the actual the layout, the white space, the where there isn’t something as well as you know, the beautiful illustrations and photography and font choice, of course, and sizing and coloring and overlaying and rotating and all the things that you get and you expect from well made, well designed print for magazines and as well as books. It’s all of that stuff that can be done in ebooks that a lot of people don’t even realize is possible,

Joshua Tallent
yeah, and that’s that’s really important, when you think about the types of books that publishers are focusing on, a lot of times, you know, obviously fiction sells and, you know, standard nonfiction cells, but there’s a lot of books that are published every year that really require the layout to make sense in a in that visual way that that that’s kind of integral to the content itself. It’s not just, I can take this and throw it into a refillable format and it works just as well. So there’s a value to having ePub fix layout tiles.

Ken Jones
Oh yeah, definitely. So ePub in particular has come from an accessibility point, and there are people who just, I’ve been in meetings in the past where people are just like, I just wish there wasn’t fixed layout, and they just don’t, don’t really value the stuff that a well designed page actually gives us. So if you take out all of the images, or even if you square off and put them into, you know, within the text. I try not to say it’s just for children’s books, but that’s an obvious example. If you take out all of the pictures from it, from a picture book, you left with not a lot at all, but, but for more serious stuff, where there’s maybe medical books, or maybe there’s, you know, stuff that really needs to be explained, annotated. You know, all of that stuff is there’s value to the visual aspect of it, and that’s not something we can always or want to or can remove.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So this sounds also like PDF, obviously, because PDF is a print format that is intended for, technically, intended for archiving the Print Layout and using it for for doing printing of print books. But a lot of people use PDFs today still as an ebook format. So what are the advantages that you see of a fixed layout ePub over a PDF file?

Ken Jones
Yeah, so they may look very similar, but the PDF is a print format, and no one really wants to open up a PDF and have a look inside. It’s my argument that that publishers shouldn’t be coders and they shouldn’t need to do that, but an HTML based document that ePub is and CSS, of course, is a lot more simple to understand and to be able to manipulate and to extend. So if we want to do something with interactivity or media overlays and making the you know, the text highlight or animate, all of that stuff is a lot more easily done and supported. So that is something that PDF is really a print replica. And if you want to do accessible PDF, that is really a challenge, still a challenge in fixed layout, and something we might talk about, but it’s easier for for people to be able to achieve in a more modern code based,

Joshua Tallent
yeah, and so when you’re talking about a really complex, really, you know, complexly designed book, fixed layout brings with brings to The table a lot of value to the size of the potential ebook file, the transportability, the capability of doing enhancements and things, which I want to come back and talk about later as well. But also it gives you, it gives you something that’s future proof in a way that a PDF, in some ways, isn’t in that, let’s say, something changes down the line and a new system comes out that has some capabilities. We saw this a lot when ebooks were first coming out. We’d see some new platform come out and it it has some feature set or some capability that other systems didn’t have. The more extensible, the easier it is for your team or your developer, whoever it is that’s doing this, to expand on your current ebook format, the easier it is to adapt to those new solutions. We saw this as well when it changed from ePub two to EPUB three. When you had really good quality code and you had a really good system in place, then you could upgrade to see ePub three more easily without having to go and rework the entire thing. So that’s one of those benefits of, you know, of a fixed layout ePub is your ability to handle future proofing the content in a way that a PDF just doesn’t necessarily offer you. It’s not intended for that purpose.

Ken Jones
Yeah, you know what? I’ve I’ve come to the realization that really it’s the the origination of our files that is important. So it’s not, you know, just by idea. I’m sure other people have come to the same realization. But basically, to get a well made output, we need to be in control, and we need to have a bit of structure to the content that we’re creating. So that’s where I think publishers should look to make just call it, you know, a well made document. It could be still a print document, and we we can still use the same document for print as we do for e book publishing, but by making it well and investing the time and effort into that making rich content, which is our documents, that’s the best way, I think, to then be as future proof as you could ever be, to to have a good starting point. So I’ve been involved with a bit of training on this sort of thing. So the whole workflow from end to end, think about how manuscripts are created, images, how they can be described. Just a change to the workflow along the way means that you’re in that publishers are in the best position to to be able to publish well made output.

Joshua Tallent
And that well made output. Also it’s reflected in a couple of things that we hear about all the time, one of the biggest one being accessibility. If you have a good control system in place for the content you’re outputting, able to output the content in a clean way, then you can make content more accessible. But fixed layout, people, obviously, very often, don’t think of fixed layout as accessible code. It’s, it’s not the same as a as a standard reflowable book, where you’ve got a heading and then some text, and then a heading and then some text, and it’s really, you know, easy to see the structure, even visually with the design. But fixed layout can be accessible. I’m assuming. Can it? Can it ever be, really, be truly accessible?

Ken Jones
Yes is the short answer. So they’re more complex a lot of the time. It’s not unusual to see dozens of text frames on the same spread, and as soon as you have that, then assessing what is a good reading order. It’s not always, you know, single answer. I think there’s some, some sort of editorial decision on terms of what is the best way to read, you know, an annotated spread. So I’ve been doing some work with Pottermore on their latest sort of Harry Potter books for little younger kids, so five to eight, sort of, so it’s not the full books at all, but they’re very lovely illustrated books, in terms of every spread has lots of things happening and has lots of information, annotations, literally 50 fonts in one book, because they’re all sort of gone to town. They look really good, and you don’t want to stop designers designing these things. So assessing the best way to make that into an accessible output was the challenge, and it made it meant that we had to actually develop some way to break up a illustration that’s probably hand drawn or painted, and it covers both the left hand right hand pages of a spread and in fixed layout ePub that automatically is a problem, because the left hand page is a completely different HTML document to the right hand page. So how to, how to split up and region these more complex illustrations. It’s something that we’ve been doing so developing the tools so people can stay in the tool in design or the layout software that they used to, but enhance and add to the the reading order and also the image descriptions for parts of images,

Joshua Tallent
yeah. And this is, this is where the accessibility, like you said, it goes back to the origination of the content, not just to the ebook development team or or or tool or whatever it is. You have to think about these things earlier. But that’s also the case with reflowable ebooks, where, you know, if you have an image in a reflowable ebook, you need to have alt text and, you know, descriptive copy for that and and reading order still matters in that context as well. If you’ve ever tried to, you know, read a complex non fiction book that’s been badly done as an ebook that has some table that’s breaking a paragraph or something. It’s things like, things like that that still, it still matters. It All. It’s that structure and that that data, I would say, as well. This is another question for you. The messy code right in the early days of ebooks, everybody that output anything from InDesign, the code was just a mess because InDesign wasn’t made, and I don’t think really is made for ebooks in many ways. So that’s another thing to talk about when we talk about accessibility, is separating the HTML from the CSS, but also making the HTML not really horrendous and easy for a reading system to understand and easy for accessibility tools to understand as well.

Ken Jones
That’s a good point. So InDesign, Adobe took the decision to to really honor the layout, for fixed layout, and to very accurately, to to less than a pixel actually position everything on the page. And you can see why that decision was done because as soon as a print designer has a word go on to the next line, you know, an ebook design, I’ll go, okay, that’s why, that’s why that’s happened print designer. That’s an error, that’s a that’s wrong, and that shouldn’t happen. And you know, as soon as the even the question that it might happen is just for a print designer is just unacceptable. So that means that every word, and sometimes every letter, but hopefully not every word, is in a span, and that span is is absolutely positioned on the page, and the way that InDesign does it is. It’s not pretty. The code is not is not nice to look at. But my opinion is, why do we need to look at the code? We only really need to look at the code if we want to do something with it, or do we want to edit it. So the the tools that that I’ve been working with can manipulate the code. Can reorder the code to to establish more useful reading order. Can add the smile information for media overlays, using those spans to bring highlights to those words. So as long as the code is predictable, it can be still manipulated, and it’s not wrong to use spans, because that that they’ve used to absolutely position the words in the right exact font and the exact size to mirror the designer’s intentions.

Joshua Tallent
Well, speaking of those intentions, there are design restrictions, content restrictions, I’m assuming that do come into play with fixed layout EPUB formats. What do you run into? What are the kinds of things that someone who’s, you know, publishing these kinds of books, or wants to publish these kinds of books should be aware of?

Ken Jones
Yeah, so as I mentioned, the left and right hand page is one consideration you can’t have something across that that actually, really is going across the page. It can look like it’s going across the page like an image. You can just have the image exactly positioned so the left hand page matches the right hand page, and it looks like a full, full spread, full bleed image. But the if you’re doing reading order, you have to do the reading of everything on the left hand page before you move on to the right hand page. So with the Harry Potter examples, there was some spreads where it actually went across the top of the page and then came back and went across the bottom of the page for his years in his school, like year one, year two, year three. So we actually did some artworking to move the positions of his years. So it changed the design. But so that had to go through design approval. But that was something that goes back to the the idea of, if you know up front, what the restrictions are for a certain output that could have been thought of and maybe designed slightly different. I try not to try and say that you know you should ever change the design, but in that, in that case, that was one also rotated. Spreads seem to be a nice little thing that that, especially children’s books, might have a feature spread that the actual book is turned so that it’s like a nice, tall picture for for one or two spreads that causes problems and you can’t really do that’s either reworked or you just you can, of course, turn a device around, but not so much if you’re on desktop,

Joshua Tallent
and there’s also things like fonts too, right? I mean, so if you’re a publisher, try to think about these things. You need to make sure your fonts have the right licenses and that you can embed them and obfuscate them, and those kinds of things as well,

Ken Jones
of course. So the fonts that we have in the later versions of InDesign, postscript fonts are now phased out, so that problem has gone away, which that was print fonts specifically couldn’t be used in ebooks, so now that Adobe’s using Adobe fonts a lot of the time, or open type And true type fonts, that that problem has gone away, but yeah, the licensing in terms of whether you’re allowed to use that font, another I keep saying InDesign, I should also talk about affinity. You know, I don’t know if you’ve tried their software out yet, but just at the end of last year, affinity announced free access to their suite of software. So I have helped affinity with their ePub development, and they also offer fixed layout and reflowable output. So affinity, affinity dot studio is their site. It’s definitely worth checking out. And a lot of the things that I’ve been doing with circular software to enhance what InDesign can do has transferred into this free affinity tool. So affinity fixed layout ePubs are a lot better than than InDesign ones. So definitely something I would encourage people to try.

Joshua Tallent
So I’ve never heard of affinity before. Is it a? Is it being utilized by publishers as a as a print layout tool already, and it’s But they’ve got, they’ve also added these ebook capabilities to it,

Ken Jones
so it definitely can. There’s a whole, you know, it’s amazing the amount of the capabilities. So in terms of color management and PDF x and, you know, proper heavyweight print production stuff is all catered for, but, but really, most people have come to affinity for illustration and photography manipulation so they would never say it publicly. But really, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign are catered for, and the announcement that they made brought together their tools into one app that they’ve now made free. It’s, it’s amazing. I can, I don’t know if you could put links to notes in the thing, but I wrote a good article about this that we can share.

Joshua Tallent
Yes, that’s good. Cool, cool. Okay, so I have one more question in our last couple of minutes here, and it’s something you mentioned earlier. You mentioned media overlays. You’ve mentioned smile files for that purpose. You’ve mentioned even a little bit of like animations. You mentioned that before, reading system support for that, even reading system support for fixed layout, epub, it’s not 100% everywhere. Let’s talk a little bit about for, again, from a practical perspective, for publishers who are thinking about this stuff, what are the limitations? What are the what’s the support look like for things like JavaScript or animation kind of stuff, and what’s how what kind of reading systems would they be focused on? Do they have to do a lot of testing on every reading system still, and kind of those kinds of practical questions.

Ken Jones
Yeah, I think it’s, it’s a good question. So the ePub format is marvelous, and, you know, extensive, but the restrictions come on either the tools that we have to create the ePubs, the distribution methods that we have to get the ePubs to people, and then finally, the the reading apps, like you say to to actually consume the those books. So it’s around the ePub format. There are these areas that need attention. So I’ve sort of mainly been the first bit, the production of these files and how to get them to publishers and for publishers to get them to retailers. The second bit is something that I’ve been working on more recently, how to actually distribute files and how to share files securely. So that is something. If people are interested, they can check out what we’re doing in that area. But the the last one, when we’re at book fairs, you may have when we’ve met in person more recently, I typically am on the same stand as calibrio, who are a Swedish firm, who make really the best ebook reader, so that reader is fully able to show everything in an accessible way of reflowable and fixed layout and audiobooks and PDFs too. So the calibrio reader is the one I always recommend, and they have a free web version of their reader that you can open any book into. But thorium is also one to to follow. That’s another open Well, an open source version of an ebook reader, and of course, Apple books and Google’s pretty good, but all of these, they don’t support everything that you can do in ePub. So a few years ago now, I did a presentation called OMG pub, which was saying how good this ePub standard is look at all these things that can be done and but how to get them to people? How to get people to be able to read them is it’s still something in 2026 that we need to think about. So I’m hopeful that we will have a nice way for everybody to be able to take advantage of what’s possible in ePubs in the future.

Joshua Tallent
That’s good. I’m always happy to see progress. And it seems like we’ve obviously made some progress, even though, even though it seems like ebooks, and, you know, I haven’t been an ebook developer for probably 10 years or so myself, haven’t made an ebook in forever, but, but it’s nice to see that we’re still making progress in the area, and it’s great to know that people like you are focused on this and thinking about the ins and outs and the practical ramifications, and trying to push the push the industry forward. So do me a favor, tell our our listeners a little bit about Circular Software, what you guys do, and where people can find out more about. You and and you personally the work that you’re doing online.

Ken Jones
Oh, okay, yeah, so circular software.com is the site we have tools that work on the Mac alongside InDesign. So green light is a tool that helps people create well made documents, be that for print or for ebooks, and it has lots of tools, as well as lots of checks and custom checklists, etc. And then circular flow is the tool that with a well made document, you can add media overlays, you can add region navigation is another thing I should have perhaps mentioned so being able to to move around a comic book or a design spread with region to region, that works really well with the calibrio reader. So these sort of enhancements to to the to the content that we’re making. One more thing, Sid Sidd, simple image description database is something that we’ve made free, and so that’s a way to have all of the images, or even these regions of images, extracted from a book, into an online system which can be described, preferably by human and Then pull all those descriptions pulled back into the layout and applied on output. So that’s yeah. So there are some nice ideas to find out about and have a look at the circular software.com

Joshua Tallent
that’s great. Well, thanks, Ken. I really appreciate this conversation. It’s nice to get back into my my roots a little bit on the ebook side, and again, to see all the great stuff that’s still working and the things you guys are doing over there circular. So thanks for joining me.

Ken Jones
Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.

Joshua Tallent
That’s it for this episode of the book smarts podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can leave a review or rating on Apple podcast or Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. And also, we really appreciate it when you share it with your colleagues. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at Joshua at Firebrand tech.com thanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books.