How to Format Ebooks – Part 1

There are as many different tips, tricks, andtechniques to formatting ebooks for the various ereaders and platforms as there are… well, ereaders and platforms. Tons of people already have incredibly in-depth guides on what you should and shouldn't do, how to make epub files from scratch, and lots of other interesting thoughts on ebook formatting.

This is not one of those guides.

Instead, I thought I'd try to break it down a bit for someone who just wants the basics and to know what kind of tools are out there and which platforms use which filetypes. Basically, an ebook formatting guide for dummies.

What uses what?

EPUB has become the international standard for ebook publishing, and is supported by the iPad, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, Ibis Reader, and Stanza. Each of those readers can use other filetypes as well, but only EPUB reaches all of them. In fact, one of the few reasons EPUB hasn't become the only filetype for ebooks is Amazon's Kindle, which uses their proprietary AZW files. I'm going to try to break it down for each platform, so bear with it if this becomes a bit confusing… because it kind of is.

iPad - The versatile iPad directly supports ebooks in ePub, PDF, and iBooks — which is really just ePub with DRM added in for security. However, iPad also has apps for both the Kindle and for Barnes & Noble which allows you to read their books on the Apple device.

Sony Reader – The current Reader supports EPUB, PDF, Microsoft Word, TXT, RTF, and BBeB, Sony's proprietary ebook format.

Nook – Barnes & Noble's ereader supports eReader PDB, ePub, Adobe ePub, and PDFs.

Ibis Reader — Unlike the rest of these, Ibis Reader is an online device that lets you to read all your DRM-free EPUB's via web browser on a variety of mobile devices, including Google Android and the Apple iPad/iPhone.

Stanza – More an app than a device, Stanza for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch supports books in the unencrypted DRM-free ePub format, DjVu, Comic Book Archive (both CBR & CBZ), and encrypted and unencrypted eReader and PDF files. Stanza Desktop supports DRM-free Amazon Kindle, Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, PalmDoc, Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, HTML, and PDFs.

Kindle – Amazon's little ereader that could supports .azw for books, but it can also read .txt files and .MOBI files.

Now that you know the incredibly wide variety of filetypes out there that each of the big platforms are using, there's a bigger question: how do you get your manuscript formatted and converted to those filetypes so you can sell it as an ebook? Check back to part 2, which will tell you how to take advantage of freeware to format your ebook.