Transcript: Embedding sustainability: Tips for ebook and print production - Tech Forum 2025
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Oct 29, 2025
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About This Presentation
Working toward sustainability means embedding green practices throughout the publishing production cycle and across departments. In this presentation, attendees will hear from Jazmin Welch, Founder of fleck creative studio, and Tzviya Siegman, Sustainability Director at the World Wide Web Consortiu...
Slide Content
Stephanie Small: Thank you all for joining us for today's Tech Forum session. I am
Stephanie Small, Product Coordinator at BookNet. Welcome to "Embedding sustainability:
Tips for ebook and print production."
Before we get started, BookNet Canada acknowledges that its operations are remote and our
colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the
Credit, the Anishinabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi'kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort
William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the
Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie, and the Métis, the original nations and peoples of
the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vaughan,
and Windsor.
We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose
land you're joining from today. Moreover, BookNet endorses the Calls to Action from the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from
gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry. The book industry has long been an
industry of gatekeeping. Anyone who works at any stage of the book supply chain carries a
responsibility to serve readers by publishing, promoting, and supplying works that represent
the wide extent of human experiences and identities in all of that complicated
intersectionality. We at BookNet are committed to working with our partners in the industry
as we move towards a framework that supports spacemaking, which ensures that
marginalised creators and professionals all have the opportunity to contribute, work, and
lead.
If during today's presentation you have questions, please use the Q&A panel found in the
bottom menu. For today's webinar, we'll have two back -to-back presentations focused on
sustainability. Speaking on print production is Jazmin Welch. Jazmin is the owner of fleck
creative studio and book designer at Arsenal Pulp Press. She works with a wide range of
indie presses, organizations, and authors. She has a love for the smallest of details and revels
in the problem-solving challenge that each new book poses. She focuses on creating
compelling and page-turning designs that stand out on bookshelves, resonate with readers,
and respect each author's unique point of view. Jaz is a book lover at heart who is ready to
advocate for your story and impress your readers. She holds an Honours Bachelor Degree of
Design from Toronto Metropolitan University and a Master of Publishing from Simon Fraser
University. As a nature lover, the environment is top of mind in her practice, and she's
always looking for new ways to bring sustainability into the world of book design.
On digital sustainability is Tzviya Siegman. Tzviya works for W3C as Sustainability
Director. She has worked in web and ebook standards for more than 15 years. Tzviya has
contributed to many standards, including ARIA, EPUB, WCAG, and the Web Sustainability
Guidelines. She strives to demonstrate that standards are a floor, not a ceiling, and products
are improved for everyone when we work toward understanding, not just compliance. Tzviya
also works on W3C member engagement and the Code of Conduct. In her spare time, Tzviya
enjoys her children and pottery. So, we're going to start over to you, Jaz.
Stephanie Small, Product Coordinator at BookNet. Welcome to "Embedding sustainability:
Tips for ebook and print production."
Before we get started, BookNet Canada acknowledges that its operations are remote and our
colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the
Credit, the Anishinabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi'kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort
William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the
Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie, and the Métis, the original nations and peoples of
the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vaughan,
and Windsor.
We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose
land you're joining from today. Moreover, BookNet endorses the Calls to Action from the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from
gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry. The book industry has long been an
industry of gatekeeping. Anyone who works at any stage of the book supply chain carries a
responsibility to serve readers by publishing, promoting, and supplying works that represent
the wide extent of human experiences and identities in all of that complicated
intersectionality. We at BookNet are committed to working with our partners in the industry
as we move towards a framework that supports spacemaking, which ensures that
marginalised creators and professionals all have the opportunity to contribute, work, and
lead.
If during today's presentation you have questions, please use the Q&A panel found in the
bottom menu. For today's webinar, we'll have two back -to-back presentations focused on
sustainability. Speaking on print production is Jazmin Welch. Jazmin is the owner of fleck
creative studio and book designer at Arsenal Pulp Press. She works with a wide range of
indie presses, organizations, and authors. She has a love for the smallest of details and revels
in the problem-solving challenge that each new book poses. She focuses on creating
compelling and page-turning designs that stand out on bookshelves, resonate with readers,
and respect each author's unique point of view. Jaz is a book lover at heart who is ready to
advocate for your story and impress your readers. She holds an Honours Bachelor Degree of
Design from Toronto Metropolitan University and a Master of Publishing from Simon Fraser
University. As a nature lover, the environment is top of mind in her practice, and she's
always looking for new ways to bring sustainability into the world of book design.
On digital sustainability is Tzviya Siegman. Tzviya works for W3C as Sustainability
Director. She has worked in web and ebook standards for more than 15 years. Tzviya has
contributed to many standards, including ARIA, EPUB, WCAG, and the Web Sustainability
Guidelines. She strives to demonstrate that standards are a floor, not a ceiling, and products
are improved for everyone when we work toward understanding, not just compliance. Tzviya
also works on W3C member engagement and the Code of Conduct. In her spare time, Tzviya
enjoys her children and pottery. So, we're going to start over to you, Jaz.
Jazmin Welch: All right. Hello, everyone. I'm Jaz, and I'm chatting with you from the
traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.
I work remotely here, designing books for various small presses and independent authors,
spending most of my time with the wonderful Arsenal Pulp Press. And a little bit of
background as to what led me to this point in my career is that I researched what made for
sustainable, satisfying reading experiences in my undergrad in both print and digital formats,
and I was exploring the aesthetics and functional things like readability and reader retention.
So, diving into the nitty-gritty of how text looks on a page is something that has been dear to
me for a long time. And as a nature lover who is very grateful for the nature around me, it's
really led me to want to make my work with paper a more sustainable endeavor.
So, paper is the biggest factor in a book's carbon footprint. So, it's important to make sure
that sustainability starts with these initial design decisions. Longer books, of course, mean
more paper, which means more raw material, heavier books, and larger shipments. So, it
impacts the entire supply chain. And what we don't often think of is where this really starts,
where the paper use starts, which is with design. This makes it clear that shaving down the
page count of a single book can have a big economic and environmental impact. And now
that there are carbon calculators out there, one of which being the sustainable publishing
tools, book carbon footprint calculator, that's actually hosted on the BookNet Canada
website, the link will be in the chat, we can now see real data regarding this impact. In
production, we can make sustainable packaging and paper choices. But long before that, we
can look to book design to assess the overall page count of a book.
So, there are a vast number of reasons as to why page counts of a book can start to climb.
And they're the fault of no one, but it can happen quite easily. You know, publishers, anyone
in the publishing chain, we all work very heavily and on very fast paced timelines. So,
manuscripts can come in that are longer than anticipated, that we don't have time to edit
down or push into a new season so books can get long that way. And sometimes books come
in on the shorter side when they are, you know, contract signed and it comes in too short.
Sometimes we'll end up beefing up the book to make it longer and kind of slowing down the
production process to really ask why these things are happening is important to make
sustainable choices. And as you can see, these are all editorial discussions as well. So,
editorial decisions also have a huge impact when it comes to sustainability. And again, it's
very clear that this happens across the whole supply chain, just backing down to paper. It
changes how much paper is used in the print process, how heavy things are to ship. And then
of course, with the world of books, things get returned and eventually destroyed. So, it has a
big impact overall.
So, once editorial has made their final decisions around the word count of a book, a
manuscript is then in the designer or the typesetter's hands. And at this stage, the solution to
reducing page count is sustainable book design or sustainable type setting. So, there's some
initial conversations that need to happen within a press in order to start working on this
endeavor. And of course, it's getting folks on board and being able to slow down and have
these conversations. So, giving more space for more generous timelines, seeing who on your
team is passionate about sustainability. Maybe there's someone like me who loves type and
would be really excited about the things that we're about to talk about when it comes to
traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.
I work remotely here, designing books for various small presses and independent authors,
spending most of my time with the wonderful Arsenal Pulp Press. And a little bit of
background as to what led me to this point in my career is that I researched what made for
sustainable, satisfying reading experiences in my undergrad in both print and digital formats,
and I was exploring the aesthetics and functional things like readability and reader retention.
So, diving into the nitty-gritty of how text looks on a page is something that has been dear to
me for a long time. And as a nature lover who is very grateful for the nature around me, it's
really led me to want to make my work with paper a more sustainable endeavor.
So, paper is the biggest factor in a book's carbon footprint. So, it's important to make sure
that sustainability starts with these initial design decisions. Longer books, of course, mean
more paper, which means more raw material, heavier books, and larger shipments. So, it
impacts the entire supply chain. And what we don't often think of is where this really starts,
where the paper use starts, which is with design. This makes it clear that shaving down the
page count of a single book can have a big economic and environmental impact. And now
that there are carbon calculators out there, one of which being the sustainable publishing
tools, book carbon footprint calculator, that's actually hosted on the BookNet Canada
website, the link will be in the chat, we can now see real data regarding this impact. In
production, we can make sustainable packaging and paper choices. But long before that, we
can look to book design to assess the overall page count of a book.
So, there are a vast number of reasons as to why page counts of a book can start to climb.
And they're the fault of no one, but it can happen quite easily. You know, publishers, anyone
in the publishing chain, we all work very heavily and on very fast paced timelines. So,
manuscripts can come in that are longer than anticipated, that we don't have time to edit
down or push into a new season so books can get long that way. And sometimes books come
in on the shorter side when they are, you know, contract signed and it comes in too short.
Sometimes we'll end up beefing up the book to make it longer and kind of slowing down the
production process to really ask why these things are happening is important to make
sustainable choices. And as you can see, these are all editorial discussions as well. So,
editorial decisions also have a huge impact when it comes to sustainability. And again, it's
very clear that this happens across the whole supply chain, just backing down to paper. It
changes how much paper is used in the print process, how heavy things are to ship. And then
of course, with the world of books, things get returned and eventually destroyed. So, it has a
big impact overall.
So, once editorial has made their final decisions around the word count of a book, a
manuscript is then in the designer or the typesetter's hands. And at this stage, the solution to
reducing page count is sustainable book design or sustainable type setting. So, there's some
initial conversations that need to happen within a press in order to start working on this
endeavor. And of course, it's getting folks on board and being able to slow down and have
these conversations. So, giving more space for more generous timelines, seeing who on your
team is passionate about sustainability. Maybe there's someone like me who loves type and
would be really excited about the things that we're about to talk about when it comes to
typography and getting your team really excited about these benefits. You know, you're not
just saving the environment, you will actually save money with lighter books across the
board. And then also just empowering your designers, whether they're freelance or in-house,
to get creative with these decisions, come together, play, research and explore. And again,
we'll kind of go over the ways that we can explore later on in the presentation.
And of course, discussing with your team target page counts. So, that's something about
slowing down the process of production and actually discussing the future of the book and
how big it should be before we dive into type settings. I know from personal experience,
sometimes we just have no time and we got to typeset what we have and get going. But when
we can step back and make some of these decisions earlier on, it will save us in the long run.
So, when thinking about sustainable book design and typesetting, there are a number of
factors that can make a difference. So, here's a list of the elements that we as designers can
manipulate in a book layout that impacts the paper usage. So, of course, the obvious one is
the font choice, and that is which font you end up choosing for your body copy. And then
within that, there's multiple factors such as the size of the type. We can't go too small, of
course. We can't just shrink the type down to make our books more sustainable because
readers don't like type that is on the smaller side as it makes for a really frustrating read. But
certain fonts do better at smaller scales, and we'll talk about why that happens in the next
page. And we of course also need to consider the audience for the size of type that we're
going to go with. X-height is another really important factor that we'll go over next, as well
as the thickness and the width of the font. Then there's also leading, which is the space
between lines. And we have to ensure that it doesn't get too tight or too loose because again,
the book will be too hard to read. But we don't have to go with really wide leading for a
beautiful looking book. There's also the margins to factor in. Too small margins will look
really compressed and too tight. And also it will impact the length of line in each line of the
text. There's kind of a sweet spot that is around 50 to 75 characters for an easy reading
experience because if a reader gets to the end of the line, that's too many characters long, it's
really hard for them to circle back and figure out the next starting point of the line. So, as
margins get smaller and the line length gets longer, we end up with a more troubling reading
experience. But again, we don't need to have insanely large margins in order to make a
beautiful reading experience.
There are also some typesetting conventions that are traditional longstanding rules in the
book world, many of which many publishers follow. And there's nothing wrong with that.
But there are things that we can question to shorten our books as well. Like, do we need a
half title page? Are there a lot of blanks that could be reduced? An epigraph on a different
side of the page, as well as things like starting chapters on recto pages and leaving the verso
blank. All those things can have an impact on page count. And lastly, of course, is the
signatures in the book itself. So, talking with your printer, what is the signature or optimal
page count where we will have the least amount of page waste and then making sure your
designer is aware of that so that they can hit that page count without having a lot of extra
paper at the end. Because again, if you are able to drop down a signature, whether that's 8, 16
or 32 pages across a whole print one, that will save a lot of paper.
just saving the environment, you will actually save money with lighter books across the
board. And then also just empowering your designers, whether they're freelance or in-house,
to get creative with these decisions, come together, play, research and explore. And again,
we'll kind of go over the ways that we can explore later on in the presentation.
And of course, discussing with your team target page counts. So, that's something about
slowing down the process of production and actually discussing the future of the book and
how big it should be before we dive into type settings. I know from personal experience,
sometimes we just have no time and we got to typeset what we have and get going. But when
we can step back and make some of these decisions earlier on, it will save us in the long run.
So, when thinking about sustainable book design and typesetting, there are a number of
factors that can make a difference. So, here's a list of the elements that we as designers can
manipulate in a book layout that impacts the paper usage. So, of course, the obvious one is
the font choice, and that is which font you end up choosing for your body copy. And then
within that, there's multiple factors such as the size of the type. We can't go too small, of
course. We can't just shrink the type down to make our books more sustainable because
readers don't like type that is on the smaller side as it makes for a really frustrating read. But
certain fonts do better at smaller scales, and we'll talk about why that happens in the next
page. And we of course also need to consider the audience for the size of type that we're
going to go with. X-height is another really important factor that we'll go over next, as well
as the thickness and the width of the font. Then there's also leading, which is the space
between lines. And we have to ensure that it doesn't get too tight or too loose because again,
the book will be too hard to read. But we don't have to go with really wide leading for a
beautiful looking book. There's also the margins to factor in. Too small margins will look
really compressed and too tight. And also it will impact the length of line in each line of the
text. There's kind of a sweet spot that is around 50 to 75 characters for an easy reading
experience because if a reader gets to the end of the line, that's too many characters long, it's
really hard for them to circle back and figure out the next starting point of the line. So, as
margins get smaller and the line length gets longer, we end up with a more troubling reading
experience. But again, we don't need to have insanely large margins in order to make a
beautiful reading experience.
There are also some typesetting conventions that are traditional longstanding rules in the
book world, many of which many publishers follow. And there's nothing wrong with that.
But there are things that we can question to shorten our books as well. Like, do we need a
half title page? Are there a lot of blanks that could be reduced? An epigraph on a different
side of the page, as well as things like starting chapters on recto pages and leaving the verso
blank. All those things can have an impact on page count. And lastly, of course, is the
signatures in the book itself. So, talking with your printer, what is the signature or optimal
page count where we will have the least amount of page waste and then making sure your
designer is aware of that so that they can hit that page count without having a lot of extra
paper at the end. Because again, if you are able to drop down a signature, whether that's 8, 16
or 32 pages across a whole print one, that will save a lot of paper.
And you can't talk about sustainable book design without mentioning 2K/DENMARK.
They're pioneers in this space. And I've seen a couple of their presentations on sustainable
typesetting. It's really exciting stuff. You can actually hire them to typeset books for you or
you can access their proprietary fonts for a per book licensing fee or even have them create a
font for you. They put in a lot of research to develop fonts that are maximum efficiency,
more compact at small sizes, and they say that they can reduce your book by 20% to 50% for
higher profit margins and lower carbon footprints. But today I'm going to be diving into
suggestions that in- house teams and freelancers can take into their publishing houses to
workshop and actively participate in. The principles we'll discuss in a minute come from the
basics of typography research and that any designer or typesetter can access and use. And as
a book designer myself, I'll also note that I'm not interested in sacrificing beautiful and
elegant design for sustainability. I believe that we can achieve both.
So, here are some type options to consider. And as mentioned, x-height is a factor in your
type choice and it plays a really important role in legibility. So, the x-height is the height of
the lowercase X in any given font. Fonts with larger x-heights and thicker, more sturdy
appearances are more suitable to scale down. So, the sizes listed here underneath each type
specimen are all comparable to each other, meaning that they will take up approximately the
same number of pages at these sizes. But two fonts in the same point size can appear vastly
different depending on their x-height. So, this can be a big part of your choice as to what font
to run with in your books. Also important to note that a font with a really big x-height will
also be hard to read, but a font with a really small x-height will definitely need to be scaled
up larger in order for it to be legible at the same size as a font with a larger x-height. And I
added in Garamond here as the first specimen because that is widely considered a fairly
sustainable font. Not everyone agrees with this, of course, but it does have great ink usage
and readability. But because it has kind of thinner elements to it, is less robust than the fonts
on the right side, it will actually won't scale down as small.
So, some other aspects of fonts that we want to consider when we're choosing a great body
copy font would be how narrow the font is. You can't just make a font extremely condensed
and hope that it'll help make your book more sustainable. It still needs to be not too narrow
or the reading experience will be not as satisfying. Another important factor is distinguishing
between letter forms. So, does the font have a clear O versus A, for example, so that when
scaled down, the letter forms aren't getting confused. You can also experiment with different
thicknesses. More bold fonts will show up better at smaller sizes, but of course, they will also
kind of get more muddy together. So, you can see how there's a lot of factors at play here.
So, it does require some experimenting. And it's really important for you to, kind of, test the
sizing and weights of various options, print out paragraphs, compare for legibility and
readability. Printing things out is one of the most important things you can do to see how
things really feel on the page.
Another thing to be wary of is, of course, contrast, so the thick and thin aspects of the font. Is
there a really high difference between the two? Because that will be hard to see at a smaller
scale as well. And lastly, something to factor into your decision is the personality of the type.
For example, do you want the type to be friendly, traditional, sharp, an old style font? Should
it feel like a storybook or relate to a specific historic period that is at the book set in? So, part
They're pioneers in this space. And I've seen a couple of their presentations on sustainable
typesetting. It's really exciting stuff. You can actually hire them to typeset books for you or
you can access their proprietary fonts for a per book licensing fee or even have them create a
font for you. They put in a lot of research to develop fonts that are maximum efficiency,
more compact at small sizes, and they say that they can reduce your book by 20% to 50% for
higher profit margins and lower carbon footprints. But today I'm going to be diving into
suggestions that in- house teams and freelancers can take into their publishing houses to
workshop and actively participate in. The principles we'll discuss in a minute come from the
basics of typography research and that any designer or typesetter can access and use. And as
a book designer myself, I'll also note that I'm not interested in sacrificing beautiful and
elegant design for sustainability. I believe that we can achieve both.
So, here are some type options to consider. And as mentioned, x-height is a factor in your
type choice and it plays a really important role in legibility. So, the x-height is the height of
the lowercase X in any given font. Fonts with larger x-heights and thicker, more sturdy
appearances are more suitable to scale down. So, the sizes listed here underneath each type
specimen are all comparable to each other, meaning that they will take up approximately the
same number of pages at these sizes. But two fonts in the same point size can appear vastly
different depending on their x-height. So, this can be a big part of your choice as to what font
to run with in your books. Also important to note that a font with a really big x-height will
also be hard to read, but a font with a really small x-height will definitely need to be scaled
up larger in order for it to be legible at the same size as a font with a larger x-height. And I
added in Garamond here as the first specimen because that is widely considered a fairly
sustainable font. Not everyone agrees with this, of course, but it does have great ink usage
and readability. But because it has kind of thinner elements to it, is less robust than the fonts
on the right side, it will actually won't scale down as small.
So, some other aspects of fonts that we want to consider when we're choosing a great body
copy font would be how narrow the font is. You can't just make a font extremely condensed
and hope that it'll help make your book more sustainable. It still needs to be not too narrow
or the reading experience will be not as satisfying. Another important factor is distinguishing
between letter forms. So, does the font have a clear O versus A, for example, so that when
scaled down, the letter forms aren't getting confused. You can also experiment with different
thicknesses. More bold fonts will show up better at smaller sizes, but of course, they will also
kind of get more muddy together. So, you can see how there's a lot of factors at play here.
So, it does require some experimenting. And it's really important for you to, kind of, test the
sizing and weights of various options, print out paragraphs, compare for legibility and
readability. Printing things out is one of the most important things you can do to see how
things really feel on the page.
Another thing to be wary of is, of course, contrast, so the thick and thin aspects of the font. Is
there a really high difference between the two? Because that will be hard to see at a smaller
scale as well. And lastly, something to factor into your decision is the personality of the type.
For example, do you want the type to be friendly, traditional, sharp, an old style font? Should
it feel like a storybook or relate to a specific historic period that is at the book set in? So, part
of the fun of this work is exploring different font options. But on the flip side, another
approach that is totally viable is to choose one font that you would use within your
publishing house across the board. Once you've done your research and have found the most
compact font that you would like to use that feels like the best sustainable choice, you can
keep using it over and over again. So, perhaps this sounds like a lot of work for already
overburdened teams, but running tests like this only takes a few hours to see some pretty
quick results.
So, I also want to note that these are not strict rules, but suggestions for teams to explore and
expand upon. The goal is to be, as I mentioned, more sustainable but without sacrificing
readability or design. Pages can still be clean, balanced, well designed, while also being more
economical. So, I did an experiment as part of my research and design because I really
wanted to kind of put these factors to the test. So, I ran some tests on a full book, but you
could just as easily run tests on one page to see how much you can increase your per page
word count, which would then decrease your final page count. So, when testing on a full
book, be sure to have your master pages set in InDesign so that changing the margins of the
text block will be able to apply to your full layout. But otherwise, here's how I did my test.
The manuscript that I chose was a pretty standard text-only book that was about 86,000
words. And I ran with a 6 by 9 trim. And then some design details to note is that part names
and part section openers were set on their own pages. Chapter opening text started part way
down the page. And then there were also dingbat editorial breaks, which means that there
were about three lines of space between various editorial breaks, which could have also been
reduced to reduce the page count.
So, in the original type setting, we landed at 310 pages. And to note this original test, we had
a font... Jenson was used, which was 11.5 points over 16 points of leading. Then the margins
are noted as well. I chose Jenson for this book because it related to the historical period and it
felt like it was the right fit. It's also an old style font that is very readable. So, it provides a
lovely reading experience. On my first test, I just decided to reduce the leading because I am
quite a fan of 16 point leading, but it is quite spacious. So, my first test was to bring it down
to 14. Bring it down to 15 would have also made a big impact, and I want to kind of hit home
the idea here that you can take any note from this presentation and it will have an impact on
page count. So, you don't have to apply all these things at once, but work on running your
own tests and see what you like best for your books.
The next test that I ran was to reduce the margins because they were quite roomy. So, I
reduced the margins slightly on all sides, which also gave me one full extra line at the bottom
of each page. So, that brought us down again to 260 pages. And then in my fourth test, I also
removed the blank versos. So, now chapter started on both rectos and versos, removing
additional amount of pages. So, we were at 252. So, we got another signature removed there,
which is great.
So, I see in the test that I did up until this point, I didn't actually change the font size or make
it any smaller because I personally felt that Jenson couldn't really go much smaller while
retaining its legibility. So, in typeset 5 and 6, I tried some of the other fonts from the page I
showed earlier that are more legible at smaller scales. So, I did Source serif at 9 points and
Fausina at 9.5 points with the 14- point leading. And they are more compact and more
approach that is totally viable is to choose one font that you would use within your
publishing house across the board. Once you've done your research and have found the most
compact font that you would like to use that feels like the best sustainable choice, you can
keep using it over and over again. So, perhaps this sounds like a lot of work for already
overburdened teams, but running tests like this only takes a few hours to see some pretty
quick results.
So, I also want to note that these are not strict rules, but suggestions for teams to explore and
expand upon. The goal is to be, as I mentioned, more sustainable but without sacrificing
readability or design. Pages can still be clean, balanced, well designed, while also being more
economical. So, I did an experiment as part of my research and design because I really
wanted to kind of put these factors to the test. So, I ran some tests on a full book, but you
could just as easily run tests on one page to see how much you can increase your per page
word count, which would then decrease your final page count. So, when testing on a full
book, be sure to have your master pages set in InDesign so that changing the margins of the
text block will be able to apply to your full layout. But otherwise, here's how I did my test.
The manuscript that I chose was a pretty standard text-only book that was about 86,000
words. And I ran with a 6 by 9 trim. And then some design details to note is that part names
and part section openers were set on their own pages. Chapter opening text started part way
down the page. And then there were also dingbat editorial breaks, which means that there
were about three lines of space between various editorial breaks, which could have also been
reduced to reduce the page count.
So, in the original type setting, we landed at 310 pages. And to note this original test, we had
a font... Jenson was used, which was 11.5 points over 16 points of leading. Then the margins
are noted as well. I chose Jenson for this book because it related to the historical period and it
felt like it was the right fit. It's also an old style font that is very readable. So, it provides a
lovely reading experience. On my first test, I just decided to reduce the leading because I am
quite a fan of 16 point leading, but it is quite spacious. So, my first test was to bring it down
to 14. Bring it down to 15 would have also made a big impact, and I want to kind of hit home
the idea here that you can take any note from this presentation and it will have an impact on
page count. So, you don't have to apply all these things at once, but work on running your
own tests and see what you like best for your books.
The next test that I ran was to reduce the margins because they were quite roomy. So, I
reduced the margins slightly on all sides, which also gave me one full extra line at the bottom
of each page. So, that brought us down again to 260 pages. And then in my fourth test, I also
removed the blank versos. So, now chapter started on both rectos and versos, removing
additional amount of pages. So, we were at 252. So, we got another signature removed there,
which is great.
So, I see in the test that I did up until this point, I didn't actually change the font size or make
it any smaller because I personally felt that Jenson couldn't really go much smaller while
retaining its legibility. So, in typeset 5 and 6, I tried some of the other fonts from the page I
showed earlier that are more legible at smaller scales. So, I did Source serif at 9 points and
Fausina at 9.5 points with the 14- point leading. And they are more compact and more
readable. The page count dropped to 238. I would also note that we're kind of getting on the
smallest side that I would like to go from a book design perspective, because that line length,
as mentioned, is getting a little bit too long. But these are still quite readable pages. The
personality of the font doesn't match the book, in my opinion. So, I would want to keep
working on that. But again, you can see that this process is all about experimentation, and I
was so pleased to see how many pages we could actually reduce while still having quite a
beautiful page layout.
So, from the results page, you can see that we could save up to 72 pages per book by
tweaking our design choices. Across a print run of just 3,000 copies, that would be 216,000
pages, which is a shocking amount of paper. And again, you could take any one of these little
changes and still have quite a reduction in your page count. So, the aim, again, is to not
sacrifice readability or design for the sake of sustainability, because at the end of the day, if a
book is hard to read or extremely unattractive, it's less likely to be read. And a book that isn't
read is ultimately not a sustainable option either.
So, just a few tips that we've discussed, but to bring them home again, as well as a few new
tips. The folio and running header placement can also have an impact. You'll often see in the
layout, especially that I just showed, you'll have the book title at the top and folio at the
bottom. If those were run together, both at the top or both at the bottom, then you could
potentially save another couple lines or add a couple lines of text to the page. As noted, if
you're playing with your margin size, be sure to check the number of characters per line for
readability and always test print things out. That will be a huge benefit to you to really see
how things will read. And of course, looking at the leading as well.
And a few other considerations. This might be more technical terms for your design teams,
but I did test some GREP and justification adjustments, which did not have much of an
impact on the page count, but they do, of course, improve the reading experience. So, keep
doing that, but it isn't going to really help with sustainability a whole lot. Another thing that
can be adjusted from the design side is the keep options. Some publishers have house rules
where you can't go...you know, lines need to stay together at the top and bottom of a
paragraph. So, sometimes you'll see the baseline of a page will be higher up on some pages
because the paragraph has been pushed to the next page. Other publishers don't have that as a
house rule, so you'll see a single line at the bottom of a page. That could also reduce a little
bit of the page count as well. And of course, across a larger book, like the longer the book is,
the more impact these changes will have but things like reducing runts, orphan, widows can
save a few pages as well, which, of course, as we're typesetting are things that we're already
looking out for but they're important parts of this process. Another thing that can impact page
count that we haven't discussed yet is just the amount of space around chapter openings. Of
course, we want those to be beautiful introductions to the chapter that are well designed. But
if you don't need to have a lot of white space and the book is quite long or has a large volume
of chapters, then it is great to kind of discuss that design for those pages to see if we can
reduce some white space.
And lastly, just some questions for you to ask production and design from this presentation.
So, for example, can we start chapters on both recto and verso pages? Do we need things like
half title page? If there's an advanced praise page, could we move it to the half title page and
smallest side that I would like to go from a book design perspective, because that line length,
as mentioned, is getting a little bit too long. But these are still quite readable pages. The
personality of the font doesn't match the book, in my opinion. So, I would want to keep
working on that. But again, you can see that this process is all about experimentation, and I
was so pleased to see how many pages we could actually reduce while still having quite a
beautiful page layout.
So, from the results page, you can see that we could save up to 72 pages per book by
tweaking our design choices. Across a print run of just 3,000 copies, that would be 216,000
pages, which is a shocking amount of paper. And again, you could take any one of these little
changes and still have quite a reduction in your page count. So, the aim, again, is to not
sacrifice readability or design for the sake of sustainability, because at the end of the day, if a
book is hard to read or extremely unattractive, it's less likely to be read. And a book that isn't
read is ultimately not a sustainable option either.
So, just a few tips that we've discussed, but to bring them home again, as well as a few new
tips. The folio and running header placement can also have an impact. You'll often see in the
layout, especially that I just showed, you'll have the book title at the top and folio at the
bottom. If those were run together, both at the top or both at the bottom, then you could
potentially save another couple lines or add a couple lines of text to the page. As noted, if
you're playing with your margin size, be sure to check the number of characters per line for
readability and always test print things out. That will be a huge benefit to you to really see
how things will read. And of course, looking at the leading as well.
And a few other considerations. This might be more technical terms for your design teams,
but I did test some GREP and justification adjustments, which did not have much of an
impact on the page count, but they do, of course, improve the reading experience. So, keep
doing that, but it isn't going to really help with sustainability a whole lot. Another thing that
can be adjusted from the design side is the keep options. Some publishers have house rules
where you can't go...you know, lines need to stay together at the top and bottom of a
paragraph. So, sometimes you'll see the baseline of a page will be higher up on some pages
because the paragraph has been pushed to the next page. Other publishers don't have that as a
house rule, so you'll see a single line at the bottom of a page. That could also reduce a little
bit of the page count as well. And of course, across a larger book, like the longer the book is,
the more impact these changes will have but things like reducing runts, orphan, widows can
save a few pages as well, which, of course, as we're typesetting are things that we're already
looking out for but they're important parts of this process. Another thing that can impact page
count that we haven't discussed yet is just the amount of space around chapter openings. Of
course, we want those to be beautiful introductions to the chapter that are well designed. But
if you don't need to have a lot of white space and the book is quite long or has a large volume
of chapters, then it is great to kind of discuss that design for those pages to see if we can
reduce some white space.
And lastly, just some questions for you to ask production and design from this presentation.
So, for example, can we start chapters on both recto and verso pages? Do we need things like
half title page? If there's an advanced praise page, could we move it to the half title page and
remove that instead? You know, again, chatting with your printer to make sure that you're
reaching the most economical page count. If you're a couple pages over, talk with your team.
Can we bring those pages back so that we can really save on that extra signature and the
blank page waste? And of course, can we reduce things like the margins, leading, text size a
little bit without the design looking too condensed? Because I have noticed a bit of a trend
these days with books towards a bit larger type, larger margins, and there's so much white
space that some of these 400 to 500 page books almost actually feel like an insult when they
could have been half the size and could have actually been more affordable to the consumer.
And the white space would have been a production choice. So, I think, again, stepping back
and really asking why with your publishing team and slowing down these decisions so that
we can make great design decisions but also decisions that are great for the environment as
well. And as mentioned, there are just so many small decisions that we can make that have a
big impact. So, if you can take even just one tidbit from this presentation and apply it to your
books, then you can reduce a substantial amount of paper across an entire print run because
truly every page does actually matter. So, thank you so much.
Tzviya Siegman : Hi, I'm Tzviya Siegman. I work for the W3C or the World Wide Web
Consortium. Give me one minute to get my slides up. I worked in publishing for more than
20 years, so some of you might know me. I now am the sustainability director at W3C. And
today I'm going to talk about the topic of "Embedding sustainability: Tips for ebook and print
production." I'm doing the ebook side. I'm going to give a little bit of a background to digital
sustainability if my slides will advance.
Here we go. So, let's talk a little bit about web sustainability. I'll talk about the context of
why we were in a document called the Web Sustainability Guidelines. I'll offer a little bit of
an overview and talk about how this translates to ebooks. In the Web Sustainability... I hope
you're having an easier time doing this in ASL than I am verbalizing this. In the Web
Sustainability Guidelines, we approach this from the mindset of sustainability encompassing
the three pillars of environmental, social, and governance. The environment addresses the
Internet and the web's environmental impact, the physical impact, the social impact is the
effort to improve the social impact of everything we've done. For example, it's not hard to
think about the physical impact, but social impact you may have read recently about the
impact that the server farms have had in Virginia and how people have turned on their water
and the water taps have only had a drip of water. That is a great example of the social impact
that a physical presence of the digital world has had on people's lives and that the governance
has to do with responsible practices. So, how do we oversee those data farms and how do we
oversee roles about AI and on and on and on?
So, our starting goals are making it easy to apply sustainability principles and the services
that they create and how do we create metrics around it. We've also tried to align with
existing efforts in various governments, including especially in Europe where there's a lot
more sustainability legislation and regulatory interests, including economic reporting and
things like GRI. We have several sections. This is divided into four sections. I'm going to go
through an example of each section.
So, in the business and product strategy section, we have guidelines that are aimed at the
organizational leadership of the... My words are just not working today. Some examples of
reaching the most economical page count. If you're a couple pages over, talk with your team.
Can we bring those pages back so that we can really save on that extra signature and the
blank page waste? And of course, can we reduce things like the margins, leading, text size a
little bit without the design looking too condensed? Because I have noticed a bit of a trend
these days with books towards a bit larger type, larger margins, and there's so much white
space that some of these 400 to 500 page books almost actually feel like an insult when they
could have been half the size and could have actually been more affordable to the consumer.
And the white space would have been a production choice. So, I think, again, stepping back
and really asking why with your publishing team and slowing down these decisions so that
we can make great design decisions but also decisions that are great for the environment as
well. And as mentioned, there are just so many small decisions that we can make that have a
big impact. So, if you can take even just one tidbit from this presentation and apply it to your
books, then you can reduce a substantial amount of paper across an entire print run because
truly every page does actually matter. So, thank you so much.
Tzviya Siegman : Hi, I'm Tzviya Siegman. I work for the W3C or the World Wide Web
Consortium. Give me one minute to get my slides up. I worked in publishing for more than
20 years, so some of you might know me. I now am the sustainability director at W3C. And
today I'm going to talk about the topic of "Embedding sustainability: Tips for ebook and print
production." I'm doing the ebook side. I'm going to give a little bit of a background to digital
sustainability if my slides will advance.
Here we go. So, let's talk a little bit about web sustainability. I'll talk about the context of
why we were in a document called the Web Sustainability Guidelines. I'll offer a little bit of
an overview and talk about how this translates to ebooks. In the Web Sustainability... I hope
you're having an easier time doing this in ASL than I am verbalizing this. In the Web
Sustainability Guidelines, we approach this from the mindset of sustainability encompassing
the three pillars of environmental, social, and governance. The environment addresses the
Internet and the web's environmental impact, the physical impact, the social impact is the
effort to improve the social impact of everything we've done. For example, it's not hard to
think about the physical impact, but social impact you may have read recently about the
impact that the server farms have had in Virginia and how people have turned on their water
and the water taps have only had a drip of water. That is a great example of the social impact
that a physical presence of the digital world has had on people's lives and that the governance
has to do with responsible practices. So, how do we oversee those data farms and how do we
oversee roles about AI and on and on and on?
So, our starting goals are making it easy to apply sustainability principles and the services
that they create and how do we create metrics around it. We've also tried to align with
existing efforts in various governments, including especially in Europe where there's a lot
more sustainability legislation and regulatory interests, including economic reporting and
things like GRI. We have several sections. This is divided into four sections. I'm going to go
through an example of each section.
So, in the business and product strategy section, we have guidelines that are aimed at the
organizational leadership of the... My words are just not working today. Some examples of
things in the business and product strategy. Forgive me. I have a little bit of a migraine, and I
apologize for the way my words are not coming out today. So, we talk about estimating the
environmental impact of a product and we talk about the end of life of a product and how
you can plan for that. So, some specific examples are we talk about mandatory disclosures of
reporting. California has mandatory reporting, and there's a lot of requirements for this in
Europe as well. So, the way that this is structured is we have a specific guideline and then we
have a list of success criteria. This is loosely modeled on WCAG, the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. So, we have the
requirement to create policies to enable people to document the mandatory disclosures in
reporting. And this affects... One of the success criteria is that this actually impacts the
reduction of your environmental waste.
The next section is web development, which is perhaps the most intuitive section to include
Web Sustainability Guidelines. These are guidelines for the programmers, for the engineers,
and this will reduce your data payloads and lower emissions. So, we have goals for
performance and energy impact. We avoid redundancy in code and we have metadata for
machine readability. So, a very simple guideline is removing unnecessary code, and this is
really just about reducing redundancy in information. We don't want to have excess code
because that requires parsing through unnecessary code. It duplicates energy. It requires
unnecessary energy.
The next section that we have is hosting and infrastructure. This is really a robust section that
says a lot in very few words. I don't know why the success criteria didn't...what is happening
here with my slides. There it is. Okay. So, we have a very simple statement. Choose a
sustainable service provider, which is saying that, for example, the hosting provider that you
choose for your data should run, let's say, on solar energy. Does that exist? Not right now,
but there are best practices for things and it's possible to do things like carbon shifting for
your hosting and you can do research about the way that this is accomplished. We also want
to optimize caching with offline access. I'll go into this a little bit more when I talk about the
way that this is relevant to ebooks. My slides have a mind of their own today. And we talk
about data storage strategies as well.
The next section is UX design. We have an extensive section about UX because there's a lot
about UX that is relevant to sustainability. We want to understand how non-users, meaning
non-humans, are impacted by the UX, so how machines parse the files. We want to avoid
being manipulative or deceptive because manipulative patterns take a lot of time. And there's
some legislation about attention seeking in the EU. There's some legislation about avoiding
attention seeking behaviors. And we want to evaluate the use and the value and impact of our
data. And we want to evaluate the use and the value and impact of our ebooks and our
websites. So, an example of UX is optimizing images for sustainability, which is something
that is going to sound very familiar because it's very similar to optimizing images for
accessibility. So, we want to assess whether we actually have a need for images because
images are very energy... They can use a lot of energy. And we want to make sure that all of
the images are optimized. We want to make sure that the smallest images... They're using
energy in the most efficient way possible. And we want to make use of lazy loading because
that also means that people are not actually loading the images unless they're absolutely
apologize for the way my words are not coming out today. So, we talk about estimating the
environmental impact of a product and we talk about the end of life of a product and how
you can plan for that. So, some specific examples are we talk about mandatory disclosures of
reporting. California has mandatory reporting, and there's a lot of requirements for this in
Europe as well. So, the way that this is structured is we have a specific guideline and then we
have a list of success criteria. This is loosely modeled on WCAG, the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. So, we have the
requirement to create policies to enable people to document the mandatory disclosures in
reporting. And this affects... One of the success criteria is that this actually impacts the
reduction of your environmental waste.
The next section is web development, which is perhaps the most intuitive section to include
Web Sustainability Guidelines. These are guidelines for the programmers, for the engineers,
and this will reduce your data payloads and lower emissions. So, we have goals for
performance and energy impact. We avoid redundancy in code and we have metadata for
machine readability. So, a very simple guideline is removing unnecessary code, and this is
really just about reducing redundancy in information. We don't want to have excess code
because that requires parsing through unnecessary code. It duplicates energy. It requires
unnecessary energy.
The next section that we have is hosting and infrastructure. This is really a robust section that
says a lot in very few words. I don't know why the success criteria didn't...what is happening
here with my slides. There it is. Okay. So, we have a very simple statement. Choose a
sustainable service provider, which is saying that, for example, the hosting provider that you
choose for your data should run, let's say, on solar energy. Does that exist? Not right now,
but there are best practices for things and it's possible to do things like carbon shifting for
your hosting and you can do research about the way that this is accomplished. We also want
to optimize caching with offline access. I'll go into this a little bit more when I talk about the
way that this is relevant to ebooks. My slides have a mind of their own today. And we talk
about data storage strategies as well.
The next section is UX design. We have an extensive section about UX because there's a lot
about UX that is relevant to sustainability. We want to understand how non-users, meaning
non-humans, are impacted by the UX, so how machines parse the files. We want to avoid
being manipulative or deceptive because manipulative patterns take a lot of time. And there's
some legislation about attention seeking in the EU. There's some legislation about avoiding
attention seeking behaviors. And we want to evaluate the use and the value and impact of our
data. And we want to evaluate the use and the value and impact of our ebooks and our
websites. So, an example of UX is optimizing images for sustainability, which is something
that is going to sound very familiar because it's very similar to optimizing images for
accessibility. So, we want to assess whether we actually have a need for images because
images are very energy... They can use a lot of energy. And we want to make sure that all of
the images are optimized. We want to make sure that the smallest images... They're using
energy in the most efficient way possible. And we want to make use of lazy loading because
that also means that people are not actually loading the images unless they're absolutely
necessary. And we want to make sure that they're sized appropriately and they deactivated
when necessary. And we also have guidelines for image management and use.
So, you're probably wondering what can you do about this as an ebook developer. And the
good news is you're probably already doing a lot more of this than you think. Many of the
Web Sustainability Guidelines match the WCAG success criteria, and I'll give several
examples. So, 3.11, you don't need to remember the numbers. I just linked here in case you
want to look it up later. Structure metadata for machine readability corresponds with WCAG
1.31 Info and Relationships. If you're working on accessibility, you're probably intimately
familiar with info and relationships where it's really important to have things set up in a
machine readable way. So, when we talked about structuring metadata for machine
readability, we're saying that a machine has to be able to parse your files. If machines can't
parse your files, they're not really useful, except for somebody who is not disabled in any
way. And if you're having a machine trip over it, you're making the machine do extra work
and you're wasting energy. So, we have some required elements which will look familiar to
anybody who's using HTML. We have the title element. We have meta tags. We have
structured data. And those are the only examples I gave. But again, if you've been working in
EPUB for more than a few minutes, you are familiar with these and hopefully you're already
doing them. And if you're not, then your EPUBs have some problems. I hope I'm not
insulting anybody.
So, we also have additional alignment with accessibility and security. You want to ensure
that your animation is proportionate and easy to control. Easy to control can also mean that it
doesn't start without the users turning it on. You want to make sure that you can stop it, that
the user has control over when to stop it. Proportionate can mean that there's not too much of
the book taken over by animation and that it's totally in the user's hands. You want to ensure
that your code is secure. That's a pretty broad statement, but you want to make sure that you
don't have any security leaks. This has been an issue that EPUBs encountered over the years.
We probably don't have any security issues that are going to be allowed in an EPUB or at
least not that any reading system will allow to enter a published EPUB. You want to set up
necessary error pages and redirection links. Redirection is important. It doesn't always work
as well in EPUB as it does on the web. But you want to make sure that we have this set up in
such a way that it's easy to read for any user, users with disabilities. It's easy to read for a
machine and that it's set up in a secure way as well.
So, let's talk also about how to take the next steps. It's similar to accessibility and privacy. It's
about your products and your tooling. We have the requirement to assign a sustainability
advocate. That sounds an awful lot like assigning an accessibility manager, which is in
WCAG. We want to support mandatory disclosure and reporting. Just like with accessibility,
we want to set up a system in our organizations so that we can have the scaffolding to do the
audits. We call them inaccessibility, but we want to do the reporting. In some states in the
United States, and I believe in some parts of Canada, definitely in the EU, the disclosures
and reporting are the most important. What are the disclosures and reporting? Often it's just
about admissions. We want to not be behind the curve on what it is that we're disclosing and
reporting, and we want to know how it is that we can do the disclosure and reporting. You're
going to ask me what it is that you're disclosing and reporting on. I'll get to that in a minute.
when necessary. And we also have guidelines for image management and use.
So, you're probably wondering what can you do about this as an ebook developer. And the
good news is you're probably already doing a lot more of this than you think. Many of the
Web Sustainability Guidelines match the WCAG success criteria, and I'll give several
examples. So, 3.11, you don't need to remember the numbers. I just linked here in case you
want to look it up later. Structure metadata for machine readability corresponds with WCAG
1.31 Info and Relationships. If you're working on accessibility, you're probably intimately
familiar with info and relationships where it's really important to have things set up in a
machine readable way. So, when we talked about structuring metadata for machine
readability, we're saying that a machine has to be able to parse your files. If machines can't
parse your files, they're not really useful, except for somebody who is not disabled in any
way. And if you're having a machine trip over it, you're making the machine do extra work
and you're wasting energy. So, we have some required elements which will look familiar to
anybody who's using HTML. We have the title element. We have meta tags. We have
structured data. And those are the only examples I gave. But again, if you've been working in
EPUB for more than a few minutes, you are familiar with these and hopefully you're already
doing them. And if you're not, then your EPUBs have some problems. I hope I'm not
insulting anybody.
So, we also have additional alignment with accessibility and security. You want to ensure
that your animation is proportionate and easy to control. Easy to control can also mean that it
doesn't start without the users turning it on. You want to make sure that you can stop it, that
the user has control over when to stop it. Proportionate can mean that there's not too much of
the book taken over by animation and that it's totally in the user's hands. You want to ensure
that your code is secure. That's a pretty broad statement, but you want to make sure that you
don't have any security leaks. This has been an issue that EPUBs encountered over the years.
We probably don't have any security issues that are going to be allowed in an EPUB or at
least not that any reading system will allow to enter a published EPUB. You want to set up
necessary error pages and redirection links. Redirection is important. It doesn't always work
as well in EPUB as it does on the web. But you want to make sure that we have this set up in
such a way that it's easy to read for any user, users with disabilities. It's easy to read for a
machine and that it's set up in a secure way as well.
So, let's talk also about how to take the next steps. It's similar to accessibility and privacy. It's
about your products and your tooling. We have the requirement to assign a sustainability
advocate. That sounds an awful lot like assigning an accessibility manager, which is in
WCAG. We want to support mandatory disclosure and reporting. Just like with accessibility,
we want to set up a system in our organizations so that we can have the scaffolding to do the
audits. We call them inaccessibility, but we want to do the reporting. In some states in the
United States, and I believe in some parts of Canada, definitely in the EU, the disclosures
and reporting are the most important. What are the disclosures and reporting? Often it's just
about admissions. We want to not be behind the curve on what it is that we're disclosing and
reporting, and we want to know how it is that we can do the disclosure and reporting. You're
going to ask me what it is that you're disclosing and reporting on. I'll get to that in a minute.
And probably, as I mentioned before, the most important is to choose a sustainable service
provider. What are the services? Perhaps it's who is hosting your cloud data. Perhaps it's who
your internet service provider is. You're going to have to do a little bit of research about what
sustainable means. Is this even possible in your area? And it might not be something that's in
your hands, but it is possible in some areas.
So, there are some guidelines that are extremely relevant to ebooks. We want to reduce the
impact of downloadable and physical documents. So, if you can reduce the size of your
ebooks, that could be incredibly meaningful, right? Ebooks are obviously downloadable. We
don't generally download physical documents with ebooks. We could be looking at print
CSS, however. We want to use sustainably beneficial user preference media queries. There
have been people in the past who have created print CSS alongside their ebooks. This might
be a bit of a controversial topic. It's something I certainly tried to do in my past in ebooks. It's
not necessarily a popular approach to ebooks, but it is possible. It's something I really would
love to catch on, but I don't think it's going to. You want to optimize caching with offline
access supporting. So, you want to make sure that the way that your caching works, this is a
very big issue in EPUB, that the offline access is available. So, EPUB is generally available
offline. You want to make sure that people are not constantly online, that the way that EPUB
is accessible is an offline version of EPUB. So, always online is incredibly energy
consumptive, and you want to make sure that that offline access is a supported way to get to
the EPUBs. And you want to make sure to communicate the environmental impact of user
choices from a user perspective. So, if you're already creating ebooks that are having a
positive environmental impact, then that is a great thing for your business and
communications and marketing departments to be telling the world. When we first started
creating ebooks, the world was very excited about the fact that this was a more sustainable
solution, but we didn't exactly market it as such. Now we are, you know, 30 years after the
internet is popularized, we recognize the negative impacts of the internet. But ebooks
compared to print books, it's hard to know which one has a more negative impact on the
environment. But there definitely are sustainable ways to create ebooks, and we can certainly
talk about the benefits.
Let's talk about how it is that we measure. In the guidelines that we've created, we're working
on a metrics tool right now, a metrics API that will go through each of the guidelines, and
that's not available yet. This guideline is still a work in progress. It should be available the
next few months. But you can take a look at any of these tools and try to understand what the
impact of your websites are and how you can take a look at them and do submissions and
improve performance. Now, just like a lot of other tools that I made for the web, we might
need to talk about how to adapt these to EPUB. But if you take a look at Ecograder, CO2.js,
or the Web Sustainability Index, you can plug in a URL and you can get a rating for your
website. So, if you do techforum.net, I think it is, and plug it into Ecograder, you can get a
score. There's a lot of controversy about exactly how these measurements are done, but the
general consensus is that having some measurement is better than having no measurement.
The controversy tends to come around exactly how to measure CO2e or carbon equivalents.
So, the world is still coming to terms with what these words mean. And as I said, having
some measurement is better than none. Carbon.txt is a machine-readable text file that you
could embed in your EPUB to explain what sustainability data... It's a sustainability metadata
provider. What are the services? Perhaps it's who is hosting your cloud data. Perhaps it's who
your internet service provider is. You're going to have to do a little bit of research about what
sustainable means. Is this even possible in your area? And it might not be something that's in
your hands, but it is possible in some areas.
So, there are some guidelines that are extremely relevant to ebooks. We want to reduce the
impact of downloadable and physical documents. So, if you can reduce the size of your
ebooks, that could be incredibly meaningful, right? Ebooks are obviously downloadable. We
don't generally download physical documents with ebooks. We could be looking at print
CSS, however. We want to use sustainably beneficial user preference media queries. There
have been people in the past who have created print CSS alongside their ebooks. This might
be a bit of a controversial topic. It's something I certainly tried to do in my past in ebooks. It's
not necessarily a popular approach to ebooks, but it is possible. It's something I really would
love to catch on, but I don't think it's going to. You want to optimize caching with offline
access supporting. So, you want to make sure that the way that your caching works, this is a
very big issue in EPUB, that the offline access is available. So, EPUB is generally available
offline. You want to make sure that people are not constantly online, that the way that EPUB
is accessible is an offline version of EPUB. So, always online is incredibly energy
consumptive, and you want to make sure that that offline access is a supported way to get to
the EPUBs. And you want to make sure to communicate the environmental impact of user
choices from a user perspective. So, if you're already creating ebooks that are having a
positive environmental impact, then that is a great thing for your business and
communications and marketing departments to be telling the world. When we first started
creating ebooks, the world was very excited about the fact that this was a more sustainable
solution, but we didn't exactly market it as such. Now we are, you know, 30 years after the
internet is popularized, we recognize the negative impacts of the internet. But ebooks
compared to print books, it's hard to know which one has a more negative impact on the
environment. But there definitely are sustainable ways to create ebooks, and we can certainly
talk about the benefits.
Let's talk about how it is that we measure. In the guidelines that we've created, we're working
on a metrics tool right now, a metrics API that will go through each of the guidelines, and
that's not available yet. This guideline is still a work in progress. It should be available the
next few months. But you can take a look at any of these tools and try to understand what the
impact of your websites are and how you can take a look at them and do submissions and
improve performance. Now, just like a lot of other tools that I made for the web, we might
need to talk about how to adapt these to EPUB. But if you take a look at Ecograder, CO2.js,
or the Web Sustainability Index, you can plug in a URL and you can get a rating for your
website. So, if you do techforum.net, I think it is, and plug it into Ecograder, you can get a
score. There's a lot of controversy about exactly how these measurements are done, but the
general consensus is that having some measurement is better than having no measurement.
The controversy tends to come around exactly how to measure CO2e or carbon equivalents.
So, the world is still coming to terms with what these words mean. And as I said, having
some measurement is better than none. Carbon.txt is a machine-readable text file that you
could embed in your EPUB to explain what sustainability data... It's a sustainability metadata
file, and that could easily be added to EPUB. I don't even know that we'd need to tweak
anything in the EPUB specifications to add it. It's a robust text file along the lines of many of
the other text files that have already been added to EPUB. So, if you're already interested in
including this information in your EPUBs as a way of disclosing information, reporting and
disclosing information about individual books, there's already a way to do this.
And my main message about this, and it's very much like what we used to do with
accessibility, is sneak it in when you can and get support to move it forward. So, we have
kind of the grassroots effort combined with trying to get support from your leadership.
Accessibility now has broad support largely because of the EU legislation and the Ontario
legislation and possibly U.S. legislation, but we aren't there yet with sustainability. There's
often a lot more support from individuals than you'll have from people who need to support it
financially, but people are really interested in this and there's real reason to support this. The
planet is burning, and we really need to do whatever we can. And as Jaz said, do whatever
you can and feel free to reach out to me. I forgot to include my email address in this last
slide, but feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about how to move this
forward.
Stephanie: All right, thank you both for all of that fascinating information. We've got some
time. We're going to take some questions from the chat. And I think I'll start off with one for
both of you. You both mentioned how important it is to get buy-in from others on your team
to support these sustainability initiatives. Do you have any tips for publishing professionals
who are maybe not decision makers to get their organizations and peers to adopt sustainable
practices? Shall we start with Jazmin?
Jazmin: Sure, I think it definitely is a tricky topic because, like I mentioned, teams—
especially of small presses, everybody's quite overburdened already, so the production
department, as well as publisher and editorial. So, I think from my side of things in
production, I think one of the best ways that you can sneak these things into conversation is
that it actually will be a cost savings. There's a lot of sustainable choices that come down to
financial savings as well. So, even if you can't get on board with using uncoated paper stock
and things like that, that might not have the cost benefit because some sustainable choices
when it comes to printing are more expensive. But when it comes to design, these are things
that you're doing anyway. It won't change your typesetting costs. But reducing the page
count of a book will save dollars when it comes to printing as well as shipping and all of that.
So, that would be my suggestion is approaching it from the financial angle a little bit to see if
you can get some buy-in. And maybe even if you are a typesetter and designer like myself, if
you need a little bit more time to assess these things, maybe asking your publisher or
whomever you're reporting to, if you can get a little bit more time on the next book that
you're typesetting, to be able to explore these things. I know it's tricky with timelines being
so fast, but to be able to carve out even just two hours to make the type choices for your
book, that can have a big impact. And then you can present the changes to the publisher as
well.
Stephanie: Right. Money talks. Tzviya, would you say it's the same on the digital side?
anything in the EPUB specifications to add it. It's a robust text file along the lines of many of
the other text files that have already been added to EPUB. So, if you're already interested in
including this information in your EPUBs as a way of disclosing information, reporting and
disclosing information about individual books, there's already a way to do this.
And my main message about this, and it's very much like what we used to do with
accessibility, is sneak it in when you can and get support to move it forward. So, we have
kind of the grassroots effort combined with trying to get support from your leadership.
Accessibility now has broad support largely because of the EU legislation and the Ontario
legislation and possibly U.S. legislation, but we aren't there yet with sustainability. There's
often a lot more support from individuals than you'll have from people who need to support it
financially, but people are really interested in this and there's real reason to support this. The
planet is burning, and we really need to do whatever we can. And as Jaz said, do whatever
you can and feel free to reach out to me. I forgot to include my email address in this last
slide, but feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about how to move this
forward.
Stephanie: All right, thank you both for all of that fascinating information. We've got some
time. We're going to take some questions from the chat. And I think I'll start off with one for
both of you. You both mentioned how important it is to get buy-in from others on your team
to support these sustainability initiatives. Do you have any tips for publishing professionals
who are maybe not decision makers to get their organizations and peers to adopt sustainable
practices? Shall we start with Jazmin?
Jazmin: Sure, I think it definitely is a tricky topic because, like I mentioned, teams—
especially of small presses, everybody's quite overburdened already, so the production
department, as well as publisher and editorial. So, I think from my side of things in
production, I think one of the best ways that you can sneak these things into conversation is
that it actually will be a cost savings. There's a lot of sustainable choices that come down to
financial savings as well. So, even if you can't get on board with using uncoated paper stock
and things like that, that might not have the cost benefit because some sustainable choices
when it comes to printing are more expensive. But when it comes to design, these are things
that you're doing anyway. It won't change your typesetting costs. But reducing the page
count of a book will save dollars when it comes to printing as well as shipping and all of that.
So, that would be my suggestion is approaching it from the financial angle a little bit to see if
you can get some buy-in. And maybe even if you are a typesetter and designer like myself, if
you need a little bit more time to assess these things, maybe asking your publisher or
whomever you're reporting to, if you can get a little bit more time on the next book that
you're typesetting, to be able to explore these things. I know it's tricky with timelines being
so fast, but to be able to carve out even just two hours to make the type choices for your
book, that can have a big impact. And then you can present the changes to the publisher as
well.
Stephanie: Right. Money talks. Tzviya, would you say it's the same on the digital side?
Tzviya: Sort of. I think that's absolutely a great tactic. I think that on the digital side, it's a
great idea to show managers and executives that there are already things that are being
accomplished. If you're doing things in an accessible way, often you're already halfway there,
so let's finish the job. Obviously, you can't quite finish it, but start small. And also, you
know, I'm always a fan of the carrot and stick approach, "Here's this legislation that's
emerging out of the EU. What are we going to do next year when XYZ happens?" And so
with websites, you can't say, "My website is only available in New York." If your website's
available in France, the people who are using RCEP in France are going to have answers. So,
you will need to be compliant with the European legislation, which is much stricter.
Stephanie: Right. And, hey, legislation might have that financial impact as well, so it's a
very good point to make. Okay, so maybe we've talked about how you're kind of making the
case for your higher-ups in your organization, but maybe we should think about how you
have conversations with your clients. Maybe they have default formats or kind of ready-to-go
designs that they always go to. How do you have conversations with them about making
changes for sustainability? Are there certain approaches that you find work best for
customers, for clients? Jazmin, do you want to kick that off?
Jazmin: Sure. I think it could be kind of a similar conversation as well. I work with self -
published authors often as well, and they are printing their own books or they're uploading to
various POD services. So, they will see that a smaller book also costs them less money. But I
think from a book design perspective, showing folks that these changes don't mean a less
elegant, sophisticated design necessarily. I think there is some finessing to get these things
right, and I think anyone who starts playing with these ideas will perhaps feel some of the
changes are quite jarring. They don't want to go too far with some of them. Like I mentioned
partway through my presentation, I love a 16- point leading, but I know publishers that use 14
because it takes up a lot less space. So, sometimes it's just getting around preferences as well.
I think publishing is one of those industries that has such longstanding traditional rules about
things. So, just getting things up to date and being okay to break rules and change things to
not have all those tons of blanks in a book and stuff like that. And I think, from a designer,
sharing the work that you do and what it looks like, and presenting beautiful work, will also
get people on board with these sustainable choices.
Stephanie: We do love a good visual, that's for sure. Tzviya, would you say that the digital
space as well has kind of a more templated approach, or are they more open to
experimentation and design of ebooks in order to get these more sustainable?
Tzviya: I think ebooks, it very much depends on what kind of ebook you're designing. If
you're designing a children's book or a cookbook, people have very particular visions. When
you're talking about your corporate website, people might be... It might be appealing to talk
about the performance, which I did not mention in the slide. That's another area where if
you're improving your web performance, in all likelihood, you're improving your
sustainability, and that's something that will really appeal to your product team. But, you
know, when you use words like that, that's going to talk about...you know, you're talking
about your bottom line.
great idea to show managers and executives that there are already things that are being
accomplished. If you're doing things in an accessible way, often you're already halfway there,
so let's finish the job. Obviously, you can't quite finish it, but start small. And also, you
know, I'm always a fan of the carrot and stick approach, "Here's this legislation that's
emerging out of the EU. What are we going to do next year when XYZ happens?" And so
with websites, you can't say, "My website is only available in New York." If your website's
available in France, the people who are using RCEP in France are going to have answers. So,
you will need to be compliant with the European legislation, which is much stricter.
Stephanie: Right. And, hey, legislation might have that financial impact as well, so it's a
very good point to make. Okay, so maybe we've talked about how you're kind of making the
case for your higher-ups in your organization, but maybe we should think about how you
have conversations with your clients. Maybe they have default formats or kind of ready-to-go
designs that they always go to. How do you have conversations with them about making
changes for sustainability? Are there certain approaches that you find work best for
customers, for clients? Jazmin, do you want to kick that off?
Jazmin: Sure. I think it could be kind of a similar conversation as well. I work with self -
published authors often as well, and they are printing their own books or they're uploading to
various POD services. So, they will see that a smaller book also costs them less money. But I
think from a book design perspective, showing folks that these changes don't mean a less
elegant, sophisticated design necessarily. I think there is some finessing to get these things
right, and I think anyone who starts playing with these ideas will perhaps feel some of the
changes are quite jarring. They don't want to go too far with some of them. Like I mentioned
partway through my presentation, I love a 16- point leading, but I know publishers that use 14
because it takes up a lot less space. So, sometimes it's just getting around preferences as well.
I think publishing is one of those industries that has such longstanding traditional rules about
things. So, just getting things up to date and being okay to break rules and change things to
not have all those tons of blanks in a book and stuff like that. And I think, from a designer,
sharing the work that you do and what it looks like, and presenting beautiful work, will also
get people on board with these sustainable choices.
Stephanie: We do love a good visual, that's for sure. Tzviya, would you say that the digital
space as well has kind of a more templated approach, or are they more open to
experimentation and design of ebooks in order to get these more sustainable?
Tzviya: I think ebooks, it very much depends on what kind of ebook you're designing. If
you're designing a children's book or a cookbook, people have very particular visions. When
you're talking about your corporate website, people might be... It might be appealing to talk
about the performance, which I did not mention in the slide. That's another area where if
you're improving your web performance, in all likelihood, you're improving your
sustainability, and that's something that will really appeal to your product team. But, you
know, when you use words like that, that's going to talk about...you know, you're talking
about your bottom line.
But like Jaz was saying, when you're talking about something that has a really important
visual, it's about breaking norms. And I've had enough experience with cookbook authors to
know that that's going to be a real challenge in that area. But when you're talking about, you
know, a basic text-only ebook, especially if it's templated, I feel like there's a lot more room
for flexibility.
Stephanie: That's a very good point that it kind of changes based on the type of book that
you're looking at. Okay, here's a question. Maybe this is a little bit more for Jaz, but you
mentioned a lot during your presentation about legibility or readability. How do you know
that what you're designing is legible or readable? Is it experience, or are there tools that you
use to kind of give you that insight?
Jazmin: Yeah, I guess when it comes to the world of colour books, there are a lot of great
online resources like contrast checkers for typography, and this would apply to web rules as
well. You can type literally into Google like contrast checker, and you can have your
foreground and background colour, and it'll tell you at what scale the type is still readable. To
my knowledge, there's not a direct tool that will tell you at what point the font is too small to
be readable because everybody's eyes are quite different. But there is a practice... It does
come a lot from just ongoing research and making a ton of books over the course of my
career. But in my undergrad, as well as in my master's, we did this practice called the
readable paragraph, where you are typesetting just a block of text and playing with the line
length, the type size, the type choice, and the leading—all the things that we talked about—to
really get the most readable paragraph that's satisfying, you're not exhausted reading it, you
can find the start of the line really well. It's got that right contrast between thick and thin. It's
not too high of a contrast.
So, it is kind of one of those things that you learn over time to really assess, which is why I
think a lot of what I wanted to get across is about experimentation. Because if you open up
any of your InDesign files and you've got five different paragraphs typeset in different ways,
that's why printing it out is so critical because you can really... You'll start to develop your
own rules and your own kind of ability to see what is most readable. Because there are
certain fonts that you'll see immediately just feel like, "Oh, I've never seen a book that was
typeset in a font like this. There's something off here. There must be a reason why that font
wasn't used." So again, the rules are there to follow, but I think a lot of it is just exposure to
really good typesetting.
So, when I'm mentoring younger designers, I'll say maybe they should get a leading ruler and
point size ruler. Because when you're reading a book that you love the feel of, you can
actually just go and check what the type size was. There might even be a colophon at the
back where you can check the font as well, and you'll start kind of building up your roster
that way of preferred designs. But to your point about templates as well, I think doing a
template for your publishing house, if you are a designer that works with a publishing house
that uses templates, you can definitely work towards creating a new template and keeping it
as a templated approach, but just nudging the fonts and the sizing in a different direction to
kind of make some sustainable choices.
visual, it's about breaking norms. And I've had enough experience with cookbook authors to
know that that's going to be a real challenge in that area. But when you're talking about, you
know, a basic text-only ebook, especially if it's templated, I feel like there's a lot more room
for flexibility.
Stephanie: That's a very good point that it kind of changes based on the type of book that
you're looking at. Okay, here's a question. Maybe this is a little bit more for Jaz, but you
mentioned a lot during your presentation about legibility or readability. How do you know
that what you're designing is legible or readable? Is it experience, or are there tools that you
use to kind of give you that insight?
Jazmin: Yeah, I guess when it comes to the world of colour books, there are a lot of great
online resources like contrast checkers for typography, and this would apply to web rules as
well. You can type literally into Google like contrast checker, and you can have your
foreground and background colour, and it'll tell you at what scale the type is still readable. To
my knowledge, there's not a direct tool that will tell you at what point the font is too small to
be readable because everybody's eyes are quite different. But there is a practice... It does
come a lot from just ongoing research and making a ton of books over the course of my
career. But in my undergrad, as well as in my master's, we did this practice called the
readable paragraph, where you are typesetting just a block of text and playing with the line
length, the type size, the type choice, and the leading—all the things that we talked about—to
really get the most readable paragraph that's satisfying, you're not exhausted reading it, you
can find the start of the line really well. It's got that right contrast between thick and thin. It's
not too high of a contrast.
So, it is kind of one of those things that you learn over time to really assess, which is why I
think a lot of what I wanted to get across is about experimentation. Because if you open up
any of your InDesign files and you've got five different paragraphs typeset in different ways,
that's why printing it out is so critical because you can really... You'll start to develop your
own rules and your own kind of ability to see what is most readable. Because there are
certain fonts that you'll see immediately just feel like, "Oh, I've never seen a book that was
typeset in a font like this. There's something off here. There must be a reason why that font
wasn't used." So again, the rules are there to follow, but I think a lot of it is just exposure to
really good typesetting.
So, when I'm mentoring younger designers, I'll say maybe they should get a leading ruler and
point size ruler. Because when you're reading a book that you love the feel of, you can
actually just go and check what the type size was. There might even be a colophon at the
back where you can check the font as well, and you'll start kind of building up your roster
that way of preferred designs. But to your point about templates as well, I think doing a
template for your publishing house, if you are a designer that works with a publishing house
that uses templates, you can definitely work towards creating a new template and keeping it
as a templated approach, but just nudging the fonts and the sizing in a different direction to
kind of make some sustainable choices.
Stephanie: And this is why designers are worth their weight in gold. All that experience. So,
I guess I've always kind of thought of ebooks as a little bit of a different animal because users
do typically have more control over things like font size and leading and things like that. So,
are there any aspects of the digital production that you would have to use your gut, you think,
or designers of ebooks would have to use their gut in order to know what the best kind of
approach would be or are there tools that can be used to increase ebook legibility?
Tzviya: I am not the best person to ask about this, but I do know who... I suspect Jaz knows
something about this, and I know plenty of ebook designers. I don't think it's professional to
recommend individuals here, but I know a lot of them.
Stephanie: You don't have to name drop. That's okay. So, I mean, would the
recommendations be pretty similar then, do you think?
Tzviya: I think so, except that, as you know, as everybody here probably knows, with
ebooks, like you just said, the user can adjust the font size, the background colour, the
foreground colour. And that's one of the great things about ebooks and what makes them so
usable and accessible.
Stephanie: Great. Okay, I think we have time for maybe one more question. Let's make it a
good one. How about for both of you, how do you envision sustainability with respect to
book production sort of evolving in the next five years? Like, where are we going next? Do
we want to start with Tzviya this time?
Tzviya: Sure. I am optimistic that the world of digital sustainability, which includes ebooks
of course, will take off. I think a lot of younger people in particular but also older people—
and I'm not defining what I mean by young and old—care a lot ab out this as individuals but
also from a corporate perspective. And we're seeing some of the problems from an
institutional level of what happens when we don't care about this, and I think that
organisations really do want to make a difference. And as we see legislation emerge, people
will be forced to pay attention to this more and more. So, we're seeing guidance come out
from around the world about how to pay attention to things digitally. AI is having a profound
effect on sustainability. So, a lot of what's coming out now is specifically about AI, but
there's a lot of peripheral information about what you as an individual can do, what you as an
organisation can do. So, I'm optimistic that people will start paying attention to things like
the size of their files, the footprint of their websites, carbon shifting of their websites, and so
on. So, I'm optimistic that that will change and that people will start paying attention to little
things like lazy loading when they haven't in the past.
Stephanie: Great. That concept of lazy loading is very interesting to me. We'll have to come
back to that another time. Jazmin, do you want to weigh in on your five-year evolution
thought?
Jazmin: Yeah, I kind of feel the same as Tzviya. I think there's just more and more
awareness about it. And I do think AI is kind of driving that because there's a lot of
information coming out now about how toxic and how bad for the environment our usage of
the internet is. But from a print design perspective, I think also there's a lot of room to
showcase what publishers are doing from a sustainability initiative. I think, as I mentioned,
I guess I've always kind of thought of ebooks as a little bit of a different animal because users
do typically have more control over things like font size and leading and things like that. So,
are there any aspects of the digital production that you would have to use your gut, you think,
or designers of ebooks would have to use their gut in order to know what the best kind of
approach would be or are there tools that can be used to increase ebook legibility?
Tzviya: I am not the best person to ask about this, but I do know who... I suspect Jaz knows
something about this, and I know plenty of ebook designers. I don't think it's professional to
recommend individuals here, but I know a lot of them.
Stephanie: You don't have to name drop. That's okay. So, I mean, would the
recommendations be pretty similar then, do you think?
Tzviya: I think so, except that, as you know, as everybody here probably knows, with
ebooks, like you just said, the user can adjust the font size, the background colour, the
foreground colour. And that's one of the great things about ebooks and what makes them so
usable and accessible.
Stephanie: Great. Okay, I think we have time for maybe one more question. Let's make it a
good one. How about for both of you, how do you envision sustainability with respect to
book production sort of evolving in the next five years? Like, where are we going next? Do
we want to start with Tzviya this time?
Tzviya: Sure. I am optimistic that the world of digital sustainability, which includes ebooks
of course, will take off. I think a lot of younger people in particular but also older people—
and I'm not defining what I mean by young and old—care a lot ab out this as individuals but
also from a corporate perspective. And we're seeing some of the problems from an
institutional level of what happens when we don't care about this, and I think that
organisations really do want to make a difference. And as we see legislation emerge, people
will be forced to pay attention to this more and more. So, we're seeing guidance come out
from around the world about how to pay attention to things digitally. AI is having a profound
effect on sustainability. So, a lot of what's coming out now is specifically about AI, but
there's a lot of peripheral information about what you as an individual can do, what you as an
organisation can do. So, I'm optimistic that people will start paying attention to things like
the size of their files, the footprint of their websites, carbon shifting of their websites, and so
on. So, I'm optimistic that that will change and that people will start paying attention to little
things like lazy loading when they haven't in the past.
Stephanie: Great. That concept of lazy loading is very interesting to me. We'll have to come
back to that another time. Jazmin, do you want to weigh in on your five-year evolution
thought?
Jazmin: Yeah, I kind of feel the same as Tzviya. I think there's just more and more
awareness about it. And I do think AI is kind of driving that because there's a lot of
information coming out now about how toxic and how bad for the environment our usage of
the internet is. But from a print design perspective, I think also there's a lot of room to
showcase what publishers are doing from a sustainability initiative. I think, as I mentioned,
so many small presses and large presses alike were just very behind on things, overburdened
teams, very busy. So, how we market and showcase what we're doing can actually be quite
difficult to get caught up on, even if we're doing accessible ebooks and sustainable
packaging, shipping, paper, all that stuff. I think there's a lot of room to grow and really
educate our readers on what we're doing about these things, because I think readers care.
Book people are paper people, and they want to know where the paper came from, especially
with the EU deforestation regulations coming in. There's so much that we have to be
worrying about when it comes to paper.
So, I do think we're moving in a positive direction. As noted with some of the other visual
things, there are kind of long-standing preferences that I think need shaking up as well. Like
when it comes to an uncoated cover stock, for example, are readers comfortable with covers
that will fray over time versus, you know, a fully laminated cover that is not recyclable? But
I do think if we educate consumers, they do want these choices, but we're not really
showcasing that they have these choices and that we're making these decisions. So, yeah, I'm
optimistic as well. I think people want to know where things are made and how they're made.
Stephanie: Lots of room to grow, it seems like in this space. Well, thank you both so much,
Jaz, Tzviya, for joining us today. Before we go, we'd love it if everyone here could just
provide feedback on the session. We've dropped a link to the survey in the chat, so take a
couple of minutes to fill that out. We'll also be emailing you a link to a recording of this
session as soon as it's available. To all our attendees, we invite you to join our upcoming
session, "The Partnership Effect: Libraries and publishers on collaborating and thriving."
That's scheduled for November 6th. You can find information about all upcoming events and
recordings of previous sessions on our website, bnctechforum.ca. And lastly, we'd like to
thank the Department of Canadian Heritage for their support through the Canada Book Fund.
And thanks to you all for attending. Have a great day, everyone.
Jazmin: Thank you.
teams, very busy. So, how we market and showcase what we're doing can actually be quite
difficult to get caught up on, even if we're doing accessible ebooks and sustainable
packaging, shipping, paper, all that stuff. I think there's a lot of room to grow and really
educate our readers on what we're doing about these things, because I think readers care.
Book people are paper people, and they want to know where the paper came from, especially
with the EU deforestation regulations coming in. There's so much that we have to be
worrying about when it comes to paper.
So, I do think we're moving in a positive direction. As noted with some of the other visual
things, there are kind of long-standing preferences that I think need shaking up as well. Like
when it comes to an uncoated cover stock, for example, are readers comfortable with covers
that will fray over time versus, you know, a fully laminated cover that is not recyclable? But
I do think if we educate consumers, they do want these choices, but we're not really
showcasing that they have these choices and that we're making these decisions. So, yeah, I'm
optimistic as well. I think people want to know where things are made and how they're made.
Stephanie: Lots of room to grow, it seems like in this space. Well, thank you both so much,
Jaz, Tzviya, for joining us today. Before we go, we'd love it if everyone here could just
provide feedback on the session. We've dropped a link to the survey in the chat, so take a
couple of minutes to fill that out. We'll also be emailing you a link to a recording of this
session as soon as it's available. To all our attendees, we invite you to join our upcoming
session, "The Partnership Effect: Libraries and publishers on collaborating and thriving."
That's scheduled for November 6th. You can find information about all upcoming events and
recordings of previous sessions on our website, bnctechforum.ca. And lastly, we'd like to
thank the Department of Canadian Heritage for their support through the Canada Book Fund.
And thanks to you all for attending. Have a great day, everyone.
Jazmin: Thank you.
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