Not a very exciting picture, I know, but it is a really large cubicle for an intern, and it’s mine! I started working at Simon & Schuster this week as an ebook production intern, which means I’ll finally learn how to make ebooks in all formats.
From what I know so far, you can have enhanced ebooks, reflowable ebooks, fixed format or complex ebooks, and illustrated ebooks (which are basically fixed format ebooks). There are a lot of applications involved when it comes to validating and fixing codes, plus multiple programs to make sure the ebook looks good on all available ereaders. And then of course there are the formats. The main ones are epub and mobi, and so far everyone I’ve talked to about ebooks finds mobi to be the bane of their existence (well maybe not quite, but close). Mobi is the Amazon version of ebooks, and it’s very finicky and often doesn’t look as nice as epub.
The first day was a little overwhelming because I had no idea what I was doing. But the people at Simon & Schuster are very patient and good about making sure their interns know what’s going on, so now I’m feeling much more confident.
Simon & Schuster has the most formal internship program I’ve ever been a part of. The first day all the interns starting that day had an orientation meeting, where we watched a video about CBS, S&S’s parent company, and got packets of info, such as the glossary of publishing terms. It felt a little heavy-handed at first (at least while we were all in the HR department), but then I realized that pretty much all the other interns where undergrads, and for many of them this was this first internship. As for me, this is my 7th and final internship (which may be a few too many).
Well that’s all I’ve got for now. So far I’ve worked a little bit with videos and read through and fixed errors for an ebook that needed to be reworked (it was already published but had many errors). It’s going to be a good semester!
