Be careful with ebook formatting
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I’ve been thinking about creating an e-book, ever since I read David Meerman Scott’s inspiring book, World Wide Rave. Got into a discussion with book production experts recently to learn more, and found out that Microsoft Word is not the best format for these things.
The reason? According to Kelly Scott-Olson, president and creative director of ATG Productions, if you use Microsoft Word as a primary source for your book file, you’ll need HTML experience as well in order to clean up the code that Word embeds into the file. She and Lisa Liddy of The Printed Page then commiserated about the frustrations of working with files that have so much information automatically embedded into them that apparently it is a nightmare in most cases to extricate it.
Has anyone used Amazon’s services to create a Kindle-ready version of their book?
I used the Amazon service to publish a Kindle-ready version of my book “Happily Domesticated”. (http://tinyurl.com/HappilyDomesticatedKindle)
I started with an Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org) document and saved it out as HTML. It did take some knowledge of HTML to clean out the extraneous code and to insert the table of contents. In the end, I found it easiest to put the file into the Amazon system, download the HTML it generated, and then clean that up in Dreamweaver.
Not the most elegant process, but it only took a couple of hours and the finished product looked good. I especially appreciated the on-screen preview which showed me exactly how the finished book was going to look on a Kindle.
Great input, Kevin. I haven’t run into too many people yet who have actually done the Kindle version of their book, so you’re ahead of most of the pack.