Kenneth Bossard's Blog - Posts Tagged "ebooks"

Kindle Formatting in InDesign Tips

by: Kenneth Bossard

When formatting an eBook in Adobe Indesign there are good tutorials online for the full process. Anne-Marie Concepción of Lynda.com teaches by far my favorite course on creating eBook files, coding the innards of your file, making sure it passes an industry standard validation test and further coding for compliance across web and mobile browsers. Her voice takes a little getting used to, but the information is so good and valuable I've come to enjoy her slightly nasal but always effervescent vocals.

Here is a link to a free sample of Ms. Concepción's teaching.

I'd like to offer three tips to eBook preparation when using Adobe InDesign. Whether you are going for the gold with Smashwords.com and want to submit a .epub instead of the more corruptible Word (.doc) file, or you are the brave type who wants to include audio and video in your eBook file, I applaud you for your daring in applying new technology.

(1)InDesign needs a plugin to automatically convert to Kindle (.mobi) format for easy upload to Amazon's Kindle Direct self-publishing platform. Although the Kindle plugin is still in beta testing form, I've found it works fine, though I've read complaints on the internet. I have none.
(2)Remember eBooks do not have set page numbers. If you're used to formatting for print books or formatting the same book for print and eBook formats, as I do for clients, you can mix files. In short, there are no header or footer page numbers on your master pages because eBooks change with the width or the reader or browser. The page numbers are left off.
(3)Newer versions of Adobe Indesign will convert all older versions. This is a tragedy if you are just utilizing a free 30-day product trial of one of Adobe's creative software products and want to revert to your older version. I did this, in fact made all three of these mistakes even after Ms. Concepción's and others' training, and was unable to go back to my InDesign 5.5 after sampling version 6. The newer version 6 promptly updated every 5.5 file on my hard drive to version 6, thus making my precious book files unusable once my product trial was over. I solved this by forking over the monthly fee for the entire Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. It keeps me up to date with all the software, but there is a never-ending monthly fee. Please be careful.

Adobe InDesign is an excellent software resource for converting text into the preferred eBook formats: .mobi(Kindle), .epub(iBooks, Barnes and Noble and most others), and .PDF (general readership). Be prepared for an in-depth learning experience if you're starting, as I did, with no prior knowledge of InDesign.

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