Creating ebooks
NOTE: This is a series I’m creating over on my blog and am reposting here at Zoe’s invitation. It may well be I’m talking out my ass. Please be kind.
I’ve been thinking about offering a quick’n’dirty series on how to create various ebook formats, wondering if independent publishers (or even micro- and small presses) know how to disseminate their wares effectively in electronic format. I know PDF is the fallback position and while I have a love/hate relationship with PDF (formatting, yay! reading on computer, boo! hiss!), most people who don’t have an ebook reading device pretty much are stuck with the computer.
(This is one reason I have issues with places like Lulu, iUniverse, AuthorHouse, etc. Their electronic delivery is exclusively PDF. I don’t know if the authors have the option to create other formats or even if they’re inclined to do so, but I urge those indies who choose such providers to check it out and diversify.)
Smashwords has a grinder program that allows you to upload your document and then spits out various electronic incarnations of it, but it has formatting issues, which is to say, some it ain’t pretty especially if you have a not-very-well-formatted RTF document to begin with. Oh well and get over it. They do a marvelous job with what they get and it’s a few hundred steps in the right direction—not to mention the fact that once you get it on your ebook reading device, it probably won’t make you any difference.
But in case you do want to know how it’s done (or, more properly, how we did it, properly or not), what tools we used, why—and we invite others to correct us on more efficient ways to do it (that doesn’t involve Book Designer, thanks)—here’s the first and most important thing you have to do:
Learn XHTML and CSS. Really.
O’Reilly at Tools of Change is pushing for all formats to be based on XML, but if you’re reading this post, this is probably a DIY project and XHTML is, IMO, easier to learn. You will need this for every format you might want to offer (except PDB [Palm] and as an ebook application [iApp] to be sold in the iTunes store).
After that, it’s all tweaks and about 6 different pieces of (almost free) software.
Go on now and learn XHTML and CSS. I’m not going to post tutorials on that when others have done it better than I.
zoewinters
Moriah Jovan
R.J. Keller
robinaltman
Evangeline Holland
alanbaxter
For help with learning HTML and CSS, i highly recommend two things:
1. w3schools.com is i site i still reference for CSS bits. It does have a section for XHTML as well.
2. Google Chrome. Download it. Install it. Use it to browse to a page with CSS styling on it, and then right click (anywhere on the page) and select “inspect element”. This thing is a lifesaver when it comes to designing with CSS. I’ve designed 4 WP themes, and have decided that Chrome is a necessary component of the design and testing process.
Lindsay, thank you for stopping by!
I’m embarrassed to say it didn’t occur to me to direct people to w3schools.com AND
that I didn’t know about Chrome. I was previously resistant to getting Chrome, but now I’m going to have to try it.
Also, I went to your site and it’s gorgeous in that beautifully Zen way.
Writers should not have to learn code.
They might want to buy a Mac, tho:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/12/22/will-mac-os-x-have-the-epub-program-for-writers/
I agree with this in theory. However:I got to thinking about this some more. I do not agree with it, particularly in the face of what’s happened to traditional publishing in the last month and the rise of direct publishing.
1. XHTML/CSS isn’t code. It’s markup and it’s not hard to learn. It just takes a little time and patience, and possibly a little guidance. C++ is code. PHP is code.
2. It doesn’t hurt writers to learn new skills that could, in the future, benefit them some other way and not cost them an arm and a leg to boot. Direct publishing requires some sort of professional-looking web presence. Didn’t you quote Ann Somerville on this issue?
3. If they don’t learn to markup their ebooks and/or websites, it’ll cost money to have it done. That’s what we’re trying to avoid here at Publishing Renaissance (at least, that’s my view of our goal). I want to give writers the ability to DIY it. My way may not be the most efficient, but it’s a start and it’s mostly free.
4. InDesign is a typesetting program, true, but it’s still inefficient in its creation of ebooks. It’s prohibitively expensive (as you know) and it has a long, very nasty learning curve.
5. Writers shouldn’t have to buy a Mac to build ebooks. I say that as a J-school grad who learned how to put newspapers together on Apple using PageMaker and who is, at heart, a Mac girl. (And I’m pissed off at Apple right now anyway.)
6. Smashwords is taking care of the problem of “writers should not have to learn code.”
7. As for conversion to epub, this free API does the trick quite nicely: Bookglutton EPUB API. Zip your cover image and HTML document, upload it, let it do its thing, voila. Instant EPUB format.
I’ll admit I’m a DIYer at heart and I love to get my hands dirty in the mechanics of things and share what I learn. Whether writers shouldn’t have to learn code isn’t really my focus.
and, if you are looking for other resources for epub conversion, please take a look at Liza Daly’s site: http://bookworm.threepress.org/ — she is a treasure trove of helpful information and cool tools.
Thanks for the info and links guys!
Sorry, I’ve been away the past few days, I’m having a hard time getting myself back in gear and back to work.
Things like HTML are things I HATE doing. Which is why I use templates to design websites, where I just have to plug in what I want to say.
For me, there is a limit of what I’m willing to do. Everybody has their limits. Some people can’t or won’t design their own covers, or their own interior layout.
I’m a bit bugged by ebook conversion. If I don’t want to DIY that, where do I get it done? And how expensive is it?
Each indie is going to have a cutoff point, where they say: “Okay, I’d rather pay for that service.”
Well, as far as I know, there isn’t a place like that other than SmashWords, with caveats:
1. If you have a price attached, you’ll have to buy it for yourself.
2. You will only get the formats SmashWords offers.
We offer:
EPUB (SmashWords does, too)
HTML (SmashWords only offers this to be read online)
IMP (This is for the eBookWise; we offer it because I have one and IMO, this is the hardest one to do–but it has a compiler that shows you your mistakes–so I’m going to start with that one in my series.)
LIT (This is for the MS Reader)
LRF (This is for the Sony Reader; SmashWords offers this.)
MOBI/PRC (This is the MobiPocket, which is what the Kindle reads. You CAN do this straight from a Word DOC, but we didn’t like the result. SmashWords offers this.)
PDB (This is for the Palm with or without eReader. SmashWords offers this. This is one of only 2 of these formats that does not require HTML. You build this using eReader Studio, which is $29.95 and it’s super easy. SmashWords offers this.)
PDF (This is the other format that doesn’t require HTML. Smashwords offers this.)
I guess my point is that for the price of your own book, you can get 5 major formats done for you. That’s pretty cheap, but it also might not be as “pretty” as you might like. SmashWords’s HTML and Javascript are very pretty (provided you read on your computer).
I have A LOT of special formatting in my book (e.g., emails, blog posts, news clippings) that I wanted to distinguish even within the limited confines of each of the formats we used. Therefore, we needed to “pretty” mine up and be careful with the HTML/CSS.
We basically converted my DOC as HTML and used macros to strip all that nastiness that Word puts in there, then tweaked the CSS from there. Once we did that, we started with the IMP format. We put it through its compiler to tell us where we had mistakes and the rest just needed tweaking.
We couldn’t have done my book in SmashWords (selecting ALL the formats) and gotten the “pretty” result I wanted from each. Each format serves a different purpose and so we did each format separately to get the result we wanted for that device.
We look at it this way: We’re asking a customer to pay $8.99 for the electronic book. That’s a lot of money for a new author for something you can’t see and can’t re-sell and can’t lend. If they pay that money, we better give them as pretty a product as we can.
We believe we did that.
As to where else to get it done, well, we can do that. We don’t have pricing yet, but we can do it.
Cool, thanks, Mojo!