eBook formatting for Kindle

[jon404]

Gary -- yes, I checked out Digital Publishing Suite a year ago, when I wrote Self-Publishing Secrets. As you say, it seemed like a hustle aimed at big-six publishers. Way too much money, and way too complicated for me! Back then, PDFs were the best bet... but Jutoh's makes it so easy to get into Kindle, I'm becoming a convert to this sort of HTML-based ebooks. A lot faster to produce than PDFs... no page formatting at all.

Jutoh is excellent for writing and compiling simple ebooks. By simple, I mean paragraphs of text and still images, which I make in Xara. The Kindle, which I'm developing for, won't show Flash or animated GIFs on the e-ink B/W screens. But my color images look great on the Kindle readers for PCs, Macs, iPads, and Android devices. For Kindle, you can just write the ebook in Jutoh... you don't have to worry about fonts or formatting, since Kindle just puts your text in their own font anyway.

Am personally put off by Apple and B&N ebook schemes. They both want access to my bank account, and Apple iBooks is now in a price-fixing scandal in Europe. Also, Amazon lets me sell my Kindle ebooks without DRM -- without encryption -- which is very important to me. I want my customers to be able to copy, paste, print, whatever. They buy it, it's theirs.

The new $79 Kindle 4 is a kick. Great for testing the .mobi files that Jutoh makes, but also surprisingly good as a reader... I got a free copy of Gen. Grant's memoirs, and am reading about the Mexican war. Thousands of free books out there!

Glad to hear you are making iPad apps -- that's neat! -- can you sell them now from your own website, or do they have to be 'approved' by the Apple store? Have a friend here doing that and he had to wait a long time, a year ago, to get into it. I think, if I were able to make apps, I'd probably do it for the Android tablets, so I could sell them myself.

Update -- My basic $79 Kindle 4 won't show Flash SWFs or Youtube Flash videos, using it's built-in browser. Today, tested it with animated GIFs -- first in a Jutoh .mobi file (no luck) and then with the Kindle browser to the GIF on a test web page (no luck).

Moral -- if you're making an ebook for the B/W e-ink Kindles, forget about animation! The Kindle Fire is another matter, of course...

[jon404]

Published a new ebook today, Drawing for Money, on Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006MRDZAW/ ...for me, this is a major work, lots of chapters, hyperlinks, and illustrations (used Xara, of course, for the cover art and interior pix).

Drawing for Money is about making a very good living from art-related work. How to earn significantly more that the US average family income, even while you are still single! How to leverage your talent – your drawing abilty – in different occupations where your visual communications skill adds great value.

Wrote the book using Jutoh's editor. Far, far faster than using a word processor! Kept it simple, only three paragraph styles -- Heading 1, Heading 2, and Normal... plus B, I, U... and some high-ASCII symbols like ©. Jutoh is an elegant writing tool -- so many little touches that make content creation a pleasure.

Also did some editing in Jutoh... but found that a paper printout via a PDF from an Open Office Writer file works better for me. I can spot typos and errors that I miss onscreen. Between the printout check and looking at a draft on my basic B/W Kindle 4, it's easy to then go back to Jutoh for correx and minor rewrites.

Late last night, after getting an ISBN assigned from Bowker, I clicked the 'Compile' button... made my final .mobi file... and uploaded it with my cover art .jpg to Amazon Kindle. Held my breath for a few minutes... and then it was OK'd. Not one problem. And when I woke up this morning, there was my book on its own Amazon Kindle webpage. So fast! And you can look inside it, so people can see the table of contents before they buy.

This marks the end of the ebook stage of my production process. No more changes to the ebook version, it is done.

Next step -- output from the Jutoh ebook final, another .ODT to Open Office Writer for the print version. Will end up around 200 6" x 9" pages. This will be the end of Jutoh use for a while, as I move into the quagmire of page layout, headers, footers, font formatting, etc... to come up with two PDFs, one for the cover, the other for the book's interior, that will go off to Lightning Source for POD printing and distribution through Ingram into the Barnes & Noble computer system. See my other ebook, Self-Publishing Secrets 2012, if you want details about how the print side works... http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006HL2I60 .

I'm not a sociologist, but I think it's a very big deal -- huge -- that anyone can use the inexpensive Jutoh program as a digital printing press. Making an ebook could not be easier. This is significant... the implications are as huge as the first Roman codexes, or Gutenberg's moveable type. Books for everyone -- but this time around, from everyone!

Jon Donahue http://jon404.com

[jon404]

From ebook to paperback -- after completing the Drawing for Money ebook, I had the Jutoh compiler make an .ODT Open Office Writer file, which began the paperback-making process. One conversion issue -- in the ebook, I made all my hyperlinks with descriptive words rather than the actual URL. So you would see 'Yahoo' instead of 'www.yahoo.com'. Going to paper, this doesn't work -- and I had to remake all the links with a format like 'Yahoo (www.yahoo.com)'. Julian Smart, who makes Jutoh, was kind enough to modify his program to automatically create this longer link format, which works for both ebooks and printed books. The pictures, at 350px wide in the ebook, came through perfectly on the print version, centered in the text on 9" high x 6" wide pages.

Compared to the ease of writing Kindle ebooks, print books are difficult -- page layout, headers, footers, page numbers, font selection, on and on. And checking, then re-checking, the paper draft printout. Small edits, a few last-minute changes. Finally, a PDF of the cover art, and another PDF of the interior text, sent to Lightning Source book printer for a proof, and then integration into the Ingram book-distribution system, and into the Barnes & Noble computer system.

It's a paradox -- like any artist, I love graphical page layouts, and think that PDFs are wonderful. But as a writer, it is so much easier and faster to create ebooks. Think early HTML: header, text, a picture and caption, more text, etc. No page layout concerns at all, and, with Kindle, no font or paragraph formatting to do either.

But in any technology, does the simpler and cheaper overwhelm the quality of the older and more expensive? Hand-drawn early books were so beautiful compared to the first printed works. And, because of the faster-cheaper-better software cycle, I'm watching book prices disintegrate. Changes!

Lastly, for Xara in all this, I'd like to see some sort of graphical ebook output choice, for the Kindle Fire and iPad and Nook tablets. I'm thinking graphic novels and children's books, where the illustrations and layout ARE the story, instead of just little images stuck into the text here and there.

But that's another day's story. Right now, Merry Christmas!

[angelize]

Merry Christmas Jon, and thanks for these informative and interesting posts on this process. Oh and Congrats on your new book!

[jon404]

Free Kindle Formatting Guide at http://jon404.com/sps-update.htm, for anyone interested in making Kindle ebooks with the Jutoh editor/compiler. Used Jutoh throughout my Drawing for Money book project... writing, editing, ebook compilation, output to Open Office Writer for the print version. Great little program... gets you into Amazon immediately without any problems.

Happy New Year!

[jyoung]

Late I know, but I have used mobipocket to get pdf to kindle. Worked well and free. http://www.mobipocket.com/en/Downloa...ilsCreator.asp. Appears to do word docs as well.

[Doobieduck]

Jon404 thank you so much for the excelent info you have provided, everyone else as well. I am considering publishing a photography book, certainly the old BnW Kindles won't do it any justice. What I'd like to ask is, I have a website created with Webdesigner 6, is there a way I could create my book with the same software then cobvert the files to publish as an eBook? Again, thanks for all your help, Jeff

[cursor]

Has anyone tried Scrivener? Not only is it a fluid writing environment, it can directly compile to .mobi and .epub (as well as export to a number of other document formats).

An Introduction to Scrivener (10-min video demo)

A number of demo videos are available here.

[wpmann01]

Anyone have new input on this? I'm looking at converting some of my existing stuff to Kindle, but don't want to have to learn all the formatting stuff myself. I've seen some gigs on Fiverr that will supposedly convert a PDF into a Kindle ebook, but have no idea how good they are or even what questions to ask. Anyone have experience with this?

[cursor]

I'm currently giving Scrivener (for Windows) a thorough examination. I'll report back on my observations.