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EPUB Format Settings?
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Sarah
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Aug 17, 2019 07:12AM
Hi. I'm wondering what the format settings should be for the word document for it to convert correctly. My word document converted correctly with Amazon, but every time I upload to Barnes & Noble and Kobo it's all messed up.
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Because Barnes and Noble and Kobo (as well as Lulu, smashwords, etc) use EPub while Amazon Kindle uses MOBI. Best thing to do: download Calibre free EPUB software from their site, place your book in Mobi format, then convert it to EPub. The other thing is Amazon says to indent at .2 and some of the others at .25 or .3. Hope this helps.
Okay. I’ll give those a try. Thanks Deborah. :)
Sarah wrote: "Okay. I’ll give those a try. Thanks Deborah. :)"You are welcome. I had trouble with the fact that Amazon kept changing their formatting (Create Space to KDP to KWS and all that confusion) which is why I went with Lulu which uses EPub while Amazon uses MOBI. Since I was having trouble with Lulu as well (some selfpublished ebooks were not formatted properly and got error messages and Lulu was fixing their formatting or something) so since I had the budget money I decided to just have Lulu publish my three printed separate books (one is PDF) all together into one trilogy book, and print and ebook (I mainly wanted ebook though). Further, by paying Lulu, I could have global distribution including Amazon, so I figure the cost is worth it. I'm too old to worry about formatting issues! I hope I was able to help you solve your problem. If Calibre is giving you problems let me know...before Amazon accepted my book I tried formatting the ebook from EPub to MOBI and it worked, so you should be able to reverse it, MOBI to EPub. Deb
Deborah wrote: "Because Barnes and Noble and Kobo (as well as Lulu, smashwords, etc) use EPub while Amazon Kindle uses MOBI. Best thing to do: download Calibre free EPUB software from their site, place your book i..."I had better luck with Calibre when I first converted my .DOCX manuscript to .AZW3 format – the format used by newer Kindles, then to ePub. .AZW3 also gave me a better rendering of my mobi. I think it's because AZW3 looks a lot like XHTML, which is what Calibre works with internally.
Robert wrote: "Deborah wrote: "Because Barnes and Noble and Kobo (as well as Lulu, smashwords, etc) use EPub while Amazon Kindle uses MOBI. Best thing to do: download Calibre free EPUB software from their site, p..."Thanks, Robert! I had no idea that could be done, and I had no idea the new Kindle format was .AZW3. Since my trilogy is for sale on Kindle though I have no worries. One reason I published with Lulu was so that Kindle and Nook and whatever owners could buy the ebook through GlobalREACH. The price was worth it.
Thanks again Deb. :)I ended up just doing a slightly different title page for the EPUB versions of my book. Because when I did Word Art it would double the words for some reason once it converted, and if I turned the words into a jpg, Calibre kept mistaking it for my cover and messed up my ToC. Calibre still won't let me change the font size without changing the font completely for some reason, but at least it looks more proportional now.
Another thing I realized was when I was converting it to EPUB, the page style setting was on Kindle for whatever reason. So once I set it to Nook, Kobo, etc. it looked fine.
At least now that I know what I'm doing, it's one less thing I have to stress about. lol
