Our First eBook Gets QED Award

When it came time to do our first e-book — Marathon: You Can Do It!, by Jeff Galloway — we couldn’t find anyone we thought would do a good enough job converting print book to ebook. So Rick Gordon did the book “in-house,” for the iPad and the Kindle. It came out really well: typography, color, graphics, and perhaps most importantly, smooth flowing of the many training charts in the book. I compared it with all the other iPad e-books on running, and it looks way better.

   We entered it in the non-fiction category of the Publishing Innovation Awards this year and it was was one of three runner-ups for the Publishing Innovation Awards in the non-fiction ebook category, from among a lot of entrants. (There were separate categories for apps and multimedia enhanced ebooks.) It was awarded the QED (Quality-Excellence-Design) seal.

   Here’s what the judges said about Rick’s work:


Marathon: You Can Do It displays a creative design that does not distract from the text, making the pages visually appealing as well as informative. Tables contain a lot of structure, yet even rendered as art are easy to read. The ‘Tips on Using This Book’ for the iPad demonstrates a thoughtfulness and sensitivity to the reader’s experience of this digital title.”

Links (runners: get a free download sample of pages):

iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/book/marathon/id403871821

Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004I6D6WG

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

2 Responses to Our First eBook Gets QED Award

  1. Congrats to Richard.

    I converted our Nile Cruise Guide (previously Word document and PDF download) into Kindle format and although it doesn't' look bad it's nothing compared to what Richard has done with the Marathon book.

    Well done.

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