Electric Book Works Modern publishing for impact organisations

Changing the way textbooks are made

The Economy is a ground-breaking, open-access economics textbook from the Core Economics website project. It is used at over 300 universities worldwide.

Our team manages the production of the book in all its formats:

The system behind The Economy’s multi-format, multi-language design sets new standards for textbook production. Its sheer size is unusual for multi-format publishing: it contains over 500 000 words in over 1200 printed pages, over 1300 images (including over 500 interactive slides) and 230 interactive questions.

To produce this multi-format book in record time, we used our open-source Electric Book workflow. This lets us have multiple editors and designers working on the book simultaneously, editing version-controlled, single-master content files, and seeing their changes instantly in both print and screen versions.

Since the Electric Book workflow lets us output print-ready files, a mobile-friendly website, an ebook and apps from the same master files, there is no need for time-consuming post-production conversions. And after publication, our clients can also continue to make changes to the content directly online, and release new updates of their book at any time.

In the page design of The Economy, our first priority was to create a beautiful book. We designed it to look less like a conventional textbook and more like an informative and visually engaging resource. Designer Karen Lilje conceptualised it on paper and then realised it on screen. Once the design was finalised, our technical director Arthur Attwell recreated it with CSS, the code that controls page layout for print and screen – effectively automating 95 per cent of a traditional typesetter’s role.

Working from hundreds of visual and data-based source files, designer Jennifer Jacobs created over 560 figures. Since many of these figures are animated with filmstrip-like images, she created over 1300 full-colour images.

The page design is simple and flexible, and includes a range of features that make the content more engaging and easier to learn from, from sidebar features and further-reading URLs to colour-coded themes visible on the page edges.

The website edition of the book includes embedded video; interactive, self-marking questions; animated figures; and popup references and definitions.

It’s also all mobile friendly and accessible. And we know that many students will be on low-bandwidth connections, so we’ve made sure to keep data consumption low. For instance, you’ll get smaller image files if you’re on a phone than if you’re on a desktop computer.

And all of this code could then be reused as-is for the various offshoots that have followed after the initial success of The Economy:

  • Economy, Society, and Public Policy is an adaptation of The Economy for people who are not economics majors, which is available as a free website, a high-quality print edition, an Android app, a Windows app, and an epub through Apple Books. ESPP reuses the code for styles and features from The Economy (we simply changed the accent colour variable in one place in the code to recolour the whole book), saving time and money by not repeating work unnecessarily.
  • L’Économie pour le Lycée (meaning ‘The Economy for High School’) is a set of three books adapted to the French high school curriculum. Using our cutting-edge workflow, we collaborated with the Core Economics website team, Sciences Po University, the Académie de Versailles and a team of high school teachers to adapt the content, code, styles and images that made up The Economy. The series of three books is available as an open-access website.
  • Doing Economics is a supplementary text to The Economy and ESPP, teaching readers how to work with real data by following step-by-step walk-throughs, to answer questions about real-world problems such as climate change and inequality. It’s available as a free website, and will be available in app and epub form in early 2020.

We hope these projects set a standard for the kind of high-quality multi-format publishing that students and teachers need.

Read more about how we did this in our Thinking section.

last updated 14 November 2019