Free Epubs Books To Download Barely Missing
Mozell Battista
Hello, I know this has been discussed before but there were terms like CC and HTML used as solutions. I am not a techie. The link that I found and that Adobe Virtual Asistant sent me (which has been and continues to be completely useless) is not of assistance. It talks about metadate and javascript. A video I found said all I had to do was export it as an EPUB (Fixed Layout) which I did. No italics. I know there can be italics in Ebooks cause I've read them.
I am 3 hours into a Virtual Assistant chat and am absolutely nowhere. Sorry to gripe, but it takes a lot of effort and talent to be as useless as the 7 (YES SEVEN!!) people I have been transferred to have been.
You really (really) don't need to use a different workflow for EPUB; at most you might need to maintain two variant InDesign documents. But with a little effort a 'dual format' document for both editions (meaning that edits etc. are always in step) is quite possible.
In theory, an export to fixed-page EPUB (FXL) should create a nearly print-like version of the document, much like PDF. In practice, trying to get fonts to export correctly and be used in precise mimicry of the layout can be a frustrating experience.
Fixed-page EPUB is an obsolete and problematic format as well. If you want "print" pages, use PDF; if you want an EPUB or ebook, respect the fluidity of the medium and export to reflowable EPUB... and accept that it will have a very different look and feel from a printed page.
Thanks James and Derek. I tried uploading to Amazon the pdf that I used for the hard copy of the book and it was unreadable. There were pages where lines of text overlapped and repeated and it capitalized letters in the middle of words. I don't know that Amazon allows you to just use the pdf for electronic, but will explore that further -- I might have missed something. I know maintaining italics might seem trivial, but mine is a research reference book and I lose all credibility if I can't correctly format the titles of newspapers and books. The removal bold formatting I don't care about because the spacing identifies them as section titles, and I can adjust the places where the kerning is a mess, it's the italics which is killing me.
As for not knowing what I am doing, I went from barely knowing how to create a new document to designing, formatting and publishing a printed book. So, I have some knowledge of InDesign and am capable of learning more. There are no problems with the print version of the book I created and it's waiting on Amazon for me to release it. The problem is exporting to a format which maintains the italics in EPUB and which Amazon won't mess about with when I upload it to their ebooks platform.
Uploading PDF for Kindle is not a good workflow. It works sometimes, but the conversion is not as straightforward as it might seem it should be, and good results are hard to obtain. That you got very poor results indicates there are other flaws with your document, probably at the font mapping level. As for the tool, InDesign does have some quirks in getting books to EPUB, but simple things like failing to maintain italics is not an app flaw.
Learning and mastering reflowable export is really the right way to go with EPUB. Fixed-page EPUB is an outdated approach and increasingly hard to bring to successful results, except for graphics-based layouts like children's books and graphic novels. And even then, getting a good result can be a headache.
And just on review: using InDesign as a simple visual page formatter and exporting to PDF for print is a deceptively simple process. You can have many flaws in a document's structure and layout and still get an acceptable printout or PDF.
When you get to more complex output and exports, though, the structure and format of the document becomes more and more critical. You can't just "hack and slash" it together the way you can in, say, Word, or for that simple "get what you see" printing.
But to assist you better it would be useful to have access to a working example. Would you be able to share perhaps a 1-page version here? Save a new version, delete all pages except for 1 or 2 pages that demonstrate the problem. Test the epub export if the problem persists. If so, package that InDesign document, double-check that all fonts are included, zip it, and share it here.
I think the problem is more complicated than first thought. I switched to EPUB (reflowable) and it preserved the italics (etc.) but not the correct order of the pages. I have uploaded two pages which have a sample of headers/regular text/italics/bold. I used Minion Varialble Concept (16) as it allowed me to do things like bold and italicize.
I have watched some of the videos recommended on the Linked in service (thanks for the reference) and will watch the rest today. But, what I think I might have to do is use Indesign for the print version, then reformat the Word file and use Vellum or Atticus. I've seen both of them work and creating an EPUB is effortless. Yes, I understand they're different software, but they've cashed in on a market that Abode seems to want to shun. I know I can hire someone, and for this book it might have been an adequate, but not great, ROI, but I want to put out small reference books (100 pages or less) that will be priced between $5 and $10. It's not good ROI to pay $200-$300 to create a book that I am only going to get a couple of dollars royalty on. I thought InDesign would be the solution because Vellum can't handle non-fiction formatting.
Thanks for the input, Rayek. I suspect you're right in that variable fonts will be mapped to the base set EPUB uses, but I'd bet two wooden nickels that this is the root cause of the OP's italics problem and other font issues.
That is, I suspect what should be is not necessarily what is... at least, not consistently. I'd have to experiment and tear apart a few EPUB files to confirm. But in any case, switching the source doc to a font with four fixed faces and weights is likely to bypass most of the faults that are occurring.
One thing you must do is download the free Kindle Previewer desktop application so you can preview what your document will look like on Kindle devices before you upload it there. Scroll down on this page and look for the yellow Download Now buttons for Windows and Mac. I hope that's helpful.
Not Kindle Create, which is a very limited tool for lego-style preparation of relatively simple books. I don't recommend it for any level of user; it's like most other Amazon software over the years, which is not a compliment.
My feeling is that the entire time for "EPUB builder" tools is long past. Books in EPUB and Kindle should no more be "built" as arbitrary constructs than, say, authors should have ever had to set their own lead type. The processes for writing and formatting publications are universal, and to set those aside to "weld up your own book from blueprints" is an outdated and wrong-focused approach.
You are right again about Amazon offerings. I think with Kindle Create, you had to manually build the TOC. There was some obscure window where you had to TYPE the chapter name in, no pasting, and if you messed up on numbering or spelling, there was no way to go back and edit. You had to start all over from the beginning. I also agree with you on ePub builders. One could dream of a day when we have at the click of one button: InDesign to upload-ready files as .pdf, .epub, .kpf, and, oepub. What, me go off-topic?
I don't think the general user base needs anything more than the export to EPUB, but EPUB really-really-really needs to evolve to a wholly new level (EPUB 4), and the bodies/committees are stuck a decade's worth of reality back, and obsessed with micro-evolution of EPUB 3, especially every detail of accessibility. EPUB is smack at the same crossroads as HTML4/XHTML and all that conflicting, patched-up mess, and desperately needs a wholesale revision along the lines of HTML5/CSS3.
And the e-publishing community is even more stuck on the methods developed long, long ago, where "e books" are some completely separate universe of publishing and (must! be!) done like assembling a tinkertoy model instead of a modern publishing flow. So there's no real market/community/industry pressure to drag the committees away from fixing one nit at a time and looking instead at the big picture.
So I will growl at suggestions that the "solution" to all EPUB problems is go to back to stone age tools and processes, because those are all a certain level of 'expert' knows. But now we really are getting off topic...
You really don't want to be calling Adobe for "how do I use this software" type questions, as you've found. They aren't experts on using the software, even though they might try to find something in a help file for you. Here in these forums you find people who actually use the software day in, day out, as a hobby or to make a living.
CC, by the way, is Creative Cloud. This isn't techny stuff, it's just the name of the products you are paying for.You should understand though that Adobe's tools are top-of-the-line professional tools. Expect to need to pay for professional training to use them effectively, you won't just muddle through like you might with (for example) Microsoft Word.
I think that Kerry is out of her depth, that's why I suggested s/he chose PDF for the format (I wasn't suggesting s/he used it as the basis for converting it into an ePub). If s/he wants to create a decent Reflowable ePub I suggest s/he takes the excellent online video tutorial on LinkedIn Learning "InDesign CC to EPUB" by Anne-Marie Concepcin (with 30-days free access!).
A long time later, years after my father died, my mother and my wife found the box when they were clearing out some old family junk. My wife knows how much I like big cats and all other varieties of predators and raptors, and she painstakingly glued the tiger back together and gave it to me as a present. It's roaring at me again as I write this: it stands on a shelf in my study, surrounded by what I hope is more congenial company -- grimacing windup monsters, maddened dinosaurs, a couple of snarling dragons with their wings outspread, and a sullen rubber shark opening wide to take a bite at passersby. The tiger seems to fit right in, but I sometimes suspect it feels shanghaied. My father hadn't got it because he was fond of tigers or because he had any interest in nature. He'd bought it in Korea, where he'd been a fighter pilot during the Korean war; his squadron had been called the Flying Tigers.
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