Bookalope is a set of AI-assisted book production tools designed to make working with book manuscripts and invalid, outdated ebooks as easy and seamless as possible. In this workshop we will dive into the technology underlying the Bookalope tools, and we will walk through the different ways of using and integrating the tools: from web app and REST API to scripting and the extension for InDesign.

1. Towards
Automating
Accessible Ebooks
Jens Tröger
1

2. Publishing workflow
Thank you Brian O’Leary for his talk about
“Building a better publishing workflow:
Recommendations from the BISG”
Production workflow characteristics:
• Single-source
• Linear
• Digital first
• Born accessible
2

3. One more thing
In our language and in traditional publishing we consider a book…
• a static (printed) object
• whose content and structure are visual
That view fails to translate to digital accessible media where we have
no control over how a reader (user) reads (consumes) the book (content)
3

4. One more thing
We need to rethink the “book”
• structured content
• presentation of that content for different media
4
Content
• Semantically structured
• Image descriptions
• Navigation information
Presentation
• A static print page
• An unknown app/browser/device
• An electronic Braille reader
• A synthesized voice to read out

5. Tools
Software tools help me get one thing done
• ease or replace tedious/error prone manual work
• composeable, integrateable, scaleable
• help improve results
Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be a useful tool to solve certain problems
I believe that production workflows can not be automated completely,
but the efficiency of most can be improved greatly
5

6. Bookalope
A collection of tools for (trade) book production
that run in the cloud
6
Single-source
Linear
Digital first
Born accessible

7. Bookalope
7
bookalope.net
github.com/jenstroeger/Bookalope
exchange.adobe.com/creativecloud.details.102942.html

8. Demo
(Youtube link)
8

9. Summary
Title: Towards automating accessible ebooks
• Bookalope does the heavy lifting to free up time for the fun stuff
• Intelligent tools help to improve efficiency,
but won’t replace human creativity and understanding
• Fear not automation and AI
“Building a better publishing workflow” is doable today
9

10. Get in touch, get involved
Website, social: https://bookalope.net/
Blogs: https://medium.com/@jens.troeger
Github:
• Cloud API: https://github.com/jenstroeger/Bookalope
• InDesign: https://github.com/jenstroeger/Bookalope-CEP
10

11. Thank you!
11

12. What if…
A bit of daydreaming: what if you could…
• fix, update your backlog of invalid, outdated EPUB files easily?
• optimize existing EPUB files?
• import structured DOCX and EPUB files into InDesign?
• build accessible ebooks without writing code?
Would that not be worth some effort?
12

13. Roadmap
Improve precision of semantic structure classification (AI)
• Redesign is in progress
New EPUB import
• Add more support for HTML5 and CSS2/3
Features
• Heaps of requests in our Github repo
13