Four Years Later Epub
Mario Davis
This post is meant to be a useful summary of issues that InDesign users encounter in their first attempts to export a project or document to EPUB format. In seeing many questions about this process, I have noted that the same basic information often needs to be covered before the discussion can get to more specific, individual answers. Forum users, especially ACEs, are invited to bookmark this topic for quick reference when an EPUB novice needs the same general guidance, either with or without additional, specific material.
1) InDesign is an excellent platform for EPUB (and Kindle).
If you have reasonable mastery of InDesign, there may be no better platform for EPUB for author/designers who focus on content and book design over archaic "assembly from components" methods. You generally do not need specialized EPUB or e-book tools, although some ability to write web styling code (CSS) can be handy.
EPUB depends on the exact reader selected by each user. There are many, and few adhere to the EPUB standard. This means that creating an EPUB document that displays identically for all users is very close to impossible, and creating one that is at least organized and readable for some majority of users is difficult.
If you still have a question about an EPUB project, create a new topic and describe the project fully, along with what reader you have tested the export on and what your goals are. Note that you've read this summary topic, as that will help speed along the focus of the help you get. We'll all help if we can!
Reading some of your posts, including this mini guide, is the reason I bought your book. I received it today and I'm so happy to finally find a useful, up to date guide on how to make epubs starting from InDesign. I thought making reflowable epubs would be a breeze when I started researching the process four years ago. Well. I've been pouring over forum threads, blog posts, barely comprehensible W3C documentation, vendor specs and the occasional video course since then, with increasing frustration. I've learned very basic HTML, CSS and regex in that time, but only to the degree that I can fix simple stuff after export from ID. There's much more I could write about my feelings on the epub format(s), it's (lack of) development and the ecosystem of hardware and readers that "supports" it, but I'll spare everyone.
Thanks for writing this book, that's the main point here. I'm about 50 pages in, and it's a wonderful feeling to have hunches confirmed, and false beliefs exposed. Of course I can already tell that I'll learn a bunch of new stuff in the later chapters too. Making good epubs at an affordable rate is challenging enough, especially in a language market with a small demographic. I hope you'll continue to update the book, as it's a sorely needed resource for the less tech savy publishing professionals out there, aka. folks like me. Again, thank you!
The days chart blows my mind as much as the weeks chart. Each of those dots is only a single Tuesday or Friday or Sunday, but even a lucky person who lives to 90 will have no problem fitting every day in their life on one sheet of paper.
The ocean is freezing and putting my body into it is a bad life experience, so I tend to limit myself to around one ocean swim a year. So as weird as it seems, I might only go in the ocean 60 more times:
The same often goes for old friends. In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%.
Four years later, a few miles down the coast in Seaside Heights, two bouncers, Jack Roig and Butch Pielka, tired of the daily grind, dreamt of owning their own place. Under-prepared and minimally funded, the two bought the first bar they considered, in a city where no one wanted to be, without setting one foot in the place. They named it the Stone Pony, and turned it into a rock club that Bruce Springsteen would soon call home and a dying town would call its beating heart.
I just got a new paperwhite, and am reading my own books on it without registering. It nags you to register, but if you open Calibre, and then connect via USB, you can put books on, and it all works just as normal. The only thing you can't do if you don't register is to "buy" Amazon's drm books, or access the ones you've already "bought."
After it is registered, you can connect via USB to a laptop or computer and transfer as many files as you want, more or less (using Calibre, etc). You don't need to purchase one thing. You don't need to use kindle to do the transferring (unless you really want to). So you really only need to connect to amazon.com one time. You don't need to connect to wifi after that first time.
I'm guessing that you are dealing with a used device wiped clean with broken wifi or you are in a country where amazon doesn't have a store or you are buying it for a young person and don't want to give him access to your credit card.
Never register your kindle when you buy. Turn off wifi by putting into wifi mode. Then just use your kindle as a sort of usb stick with screen. Drag and drop pdf and mobi files (use the great free program Calibre to convert epub etc to these formats. This works for a kindle of a couple of years ago with the square button on the bottom.
I just got a new paperwhite 09/2018 and you can use it without registering although it may not seem like it at first. You'll see the connect & register screen when first starting up and it won't let you do anything else. Pretend like you are going to, search for networks, but don't join anything. Cancel back out and it will then ask if you would like to continue setup later. Do that and then never register if that's what you prefer.
Yes, you can use a Kindle without an account, or without registering it. You can copy MOBI or PDF or a few other data file formats into the "Documents" directory using USB, and it'll display them just fine. There are four differences I've found that apply to all the Kindles I've tried this with.
Looking back over the last decade, I have made many good fast decisions, but I have nearly never made good rushed decisions. The former can be made from a place of calm, whereas the latter come from a place of turbulence and blurred judgment.
The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.
What a fantastic idea. This would be a great experiment to even try for a month. Take a week and consume a book, outline the life to live with continual reference to the book daily as well journal your progress every day and maybe do a blog/vlog or create a youtube channel for it to capture it for yourself and others. So many possibilities with this.
Ive read your comment =) WOW, AMAZING! Im a founder and lover of the 4HWW too. Tim has helped me get through some tough times and so has his community. Good for you, girl. It makes me so happy to hear stories like yours.
Thank you for being such a great inspiration for health, creativity, productivity and more. Over the years, my husband and I have bought and read all of your books, even sharing it with our son, who is now a teenager in high school. Love your idea of simplifying and reducing the mental clutter that can plague modern life.
Those 4 decisions eliminated thousands of bad choices. Thank you, Tim, for your help through your podcasts. The Greg McKeown podcast and his book helped me overcome managing a bunch of decisions that would have been subject to willpower failures or motivation issues. Instead, I just said I am making these 4 decisions.
My wife and I recently divested ourselves from a 5,000 s.f. antebellum home and moved to Costa Rica for 75% of the year. Over 3 years, we reduced attachments to acquired things, useless possessions and, ultimately, the house where we had raised our 3 kids.
We were going to buy in Costa Rica and I spent 7 trips to do my due diligence on the local real estate market. I even found a few fantastic fire sale deals. Luckily, we had the discipline to simplification and we chose to rent.
Ive stopped taking my phone with me when I leave the house if it is not avoidable (e.g. for navigation). Its a big relieve. No more decisions to be made regarding answering messages, phone calls or surfing a bit. When Im on the playground with my kids Im the only father, that doesnt pull out his phone once. I highly recommend trying it. My first strange discovery: You get the feeling it might actually be dangerous to leave the house with no phone. Bullshit! Ive done it for 20 years when I was young (Im 45 now).
When I was in grad school my graduate advisor criticized his students about how many papers and books we were reading. He wanted us to stop reading and do our own original thinking/research. He was a great mentor and turned out to be right on this.
I think rereading books is the way to go. Too often we are caught in the moment while we read with a wonderful idea but instead of taking the time translate to action, we get caught up chasing unicorns in new data.
A similar thing happens with my clients, and their 2 am emergencies of the universe exploding. If I wait long enough, they figure out that the cause was their own wrongdoing, and a polite apology attached to an embarrassing email is promptly received.
I love this comment. Makes so much sense to me! Do you have a certain method that you use to time block (i.e. how big of a block to give to something, how to schedule those blocks either earlier or later in the day, etc.)? Thanks!!
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