ellemala graidee monday

[Nancie Fazzari]

It used to be so easy to upload an epub file from indesign to amazon kdp, and the conversion to mobi would happen right there, within amazon. Now, apparently, Amazon is making one use kindle create, which makes one upload word docs, and use one of their templates. One has to recreate much of the styling, as well as place images anew. Don't even get me started on footnotes with hyperlinks! I used to be able to create an entire indesign book for print, and then save another copy of that book, and save it as an e-book. Now, one can't do that. It seems I have to create a whole new book just for kindle. Has anyone mastered this, or can set me straight?

Its just text within a book document, laid out in InDesign cc. There's nothing live about it, except for links within footnotes, which are copious. Lots of images are included within the body of the text, and they're anchored. There's no image with embedded linkage. As for fonts, I'm just using Times New Roman font, regular and italic. Nothing fancy. I did see in the fuzzy kindle previewer that my italicized words did retain their italization. If I can understand better how styles will be preserved in KDP kindle book, then I may use a different font for chapter heads. In previous ebooks I've created, I had plenty of "styles."

How is this a "correct answer"? As per the many replies, this approach renders an unusable result, and is unacceptable. Is it possible to use some other Adobe product, such as dreamweaver, to produce content for kdp?

You really don't need to jump though all these hoops to get an InDesign book into Kindle. You most certainly don't need to export to Word and then rebuild in that terrible novice's-tool Kindle Create, not if you're a reasonably skilled ID user.

Well, that's crazy, but I've never pre-released a book before, so maybe it's normal behavior. (As if anything KDP does can be called normal... insert rant about the awful system for writing the book description!)

The title is InDesign & Word to Kindle: A Professional Guide. I try to avoid linking my name and user name when I can (to keep my search results tidy, more than anything else) so the curious will just have to go look

I stumbled across this article, Smartphones: The Next Home of the Ebook? here on The Book Designer site discussing the potential of smart phones as ereaders. This led me to wonder about uploading and viewing my current work in progress on a smart phone (an old HTC Evo) and my iPad, as well as viewing it in a Firefox epub reader on my laptop browser.

For me, an unexpected benefit of testing my epub file like this turned out to be that simply reading my words on a different screen in a different layout revealed typos and errors that I had repeatedly glossed over on my main laptop.

Dropbox is a central part of this exercise. This is a free online service letting users upload a file once and then access that file from multiple other locations and devices. Dropbox is similar to ftp in the web development world, but more user friendly. In this test exercise, the main benefit of Dropbox is the ease of accessing the epub file in my online Dropbox folder from a smart phone and an iPad. On both phone and iPad, the Dropbox client proved easy to use and similar in appearance.

The big writing packages handle the layout as you write. Epub, on the other hand, is all about html, which lacks any built in rules for layout. You have to add that layer yourself (aka CSS). I think Sigil does a fine job with their supplied CSS. I find constructing the table of contents to be a particularly great part of Sigil. Another issue I now appreciate is cover images. They can be tricky, particularly with iBooks/iPads.

Each of the ereader apps allows you to view your epub file as a local file on your smart phone, iPad and browser. This viewing is a private local affair with no uploading to third party public stores, no validation requirements, etc. You are not publishing anything. You are privately and locally viewing your work on the above reading devices, courtesy of your private Dropbox folder.

A simple single tap on the ereader app you choose in the dialog box seen in Figure 4 is all you need to open and start reading your epub file in your phone ereader. The ereader apps I used all offered the same basic choices, with minor differences between the four.

Twenty minutes of messing around on your phone will have you up to speed on the basics of each ereader. Google searches offer up an array of helpful answers to navigate the feature set of each ereader app. Your mileage may vary and of course you are free to use others of the many good ereaders available.

The whole point of this exercise is to see how ereader apps handle your epub file, prior to publishing your book and having readers alert you to the surprises they find in your epub file after it is published.

The most valuable thing I discovered was that the same epub file with the same exact cover image appeared differently in the Aldiko app relative to the Moon+, Cool, and Kobo readers. This was immensely frustrating but valuable, because at least I now know that my cover image works on three mobile readers and not on the other.

I found that Aldiko appears to be based on Adobe DRM technology. At this point I can only speculate that it handles images differently relative to Moon+, Cool, and Kobo. The Moon+, Cool, and Kobo readers are not based on the Adobe technology as far as I can tell. Tech support emails eventually yielded Aldiko responses blaming me for using the wrong image and offering no suggestions. I still have not found any advice on optimum cover image dimensions or image best practices, so I have no firm answer as I write this article.

Each ereader comes with its own default CSS. Each ereader also has menu options that turn external CSS off and on. Playing with these settings and evaluating how each setting affects your epub reader is valuable experience.

Uploading and checking the epub file tends to be an iterative process. Remember that old scientific method from high school? Maybe it was college. It has not changed since then and continues to suggest making one change at a time and then evaluating that change in a new version.

Each time I make a new version I like to add/update the time in the file name. As I am testing and making new versions, once I upload the epub from my laptop Dropbox client to the Dropbox cloud, it is a simple check to look at the time stamp in the file name and verify that I am looking at the most recent version of my epub file. I thought this simple step proved to be the most important in my evaluating. Once I start to make changes, it is easy to forget if I have uploaded the latest version or not. Adding the timestamp into the file name makes it easy to check the version on my laptop against the version in the Dropbox cloud.

I may be suspicious, but I think deleting the current file from both device ereader and Dropbox prior to uploading the fresh file is an important part of the process. I start with removing the local epub file from each of the ereaders. You will need to remove the local file in each ereader you have used.

Although in this article I describe the iPad separately, when I test I am going back and forth between phone ereader apps and the iPad iBook app concurrently. With the epub file in the Dropbox cloud, I single tap to open the Dropbox client on my iPad.

For all the attention that epub is getting, looking good in Amazon and on Amazon devices remains paramount. So I think the Kindle Previewer deserves a shout out. When I started in 2009, everything was done manually via the KDP interface in a web browser. Flash forward to January 2014 and downloading, installing and using the Kindle Previewer was a huge change for me relative to earlier methods.

The Kindle Previewer took my very same epub file I was testing with elsewhere, converted it (including large color images) and offered me a choice of three different simulated Kindle devices to view the converted file. Very easy to use. I think every indie author should download and use the Kindle Previewer. I think it is well worth using to evaluate your file and how well in converts to the mobi format. Please note that I still adhere to the image size limit of 127kb.

I did not use iTunes in this testing process, mainly because I use an Android phone and not an iPhone. Downloading my file via Dropbox was effectively an end around using iTunes. Working in iTunes is certainly another possible route to go when testing local files.

My experience with the Aldiko reader app left a bad taste in my mouth. It frustrates me that Aldiko, so far, seems to break on the very same images that Kobo, Cool, Moon+, iBook and EPUBREADER all seem to handle quite well.

I remain shocked that I have been unable to find any image best practice recommendations from either Aldiko or Adobe. At this point I cannot find a fix and am left wondering what to do, other than recommend the other reader apps. On the upside, if your book contains few images, then you may not have any issues. I thought Aldiko handled text just fine.

I enjoy writing. I also enjoy this dawning era of control for indie authors and self publishers. As mobile devices proliferate, people are increasingly using them to read. I think this is an opportunity for authors.

Evaluating your work as an epub file on the devices and apps your readers are likely to be using should be fairly important to every author. Evaluating your epub file early on in your writing phase can help you spot problems.

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