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My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips

111 pointsby ejpastorinoover 12 years ago

11 comments

KeliNorthover 12 years ago
It takes a significant amount of effort to do this all personally, this is very commendable. I self-publish and work for a company that helps others self-publish by editing/designing and converting their work, and it's always something very involved.<p>It's not as simple as just clicking convert either. Tables render differently in Epub and kindle, TOC creation can be a veritable mess and table rendering in Epub and Kindle conversions look different if done wrong.<p>Mobi conversion tools may or may not fix issues that'd appear if the official Kindle KDP tool is used, meaning a converted Mobi may end up looking entirely different than the same file once uploaded to Amazon.<p>Graphs... I don't even want to think about dealing with those and Kindle, congratulations on doing all of this yourself without screaming. My first couple book conversions were learning experiences, and they were mostly plain text (chapter fiction books) without varying fonts and diagrams.<p>So, if I had to sum up what I've learned into one idea that'd make the entire process easier, it'd be this:<p>Write plain text or rich text. Don't format when writing. Do write as non-fancy as possible in your master text. Then when you have to add stuff to it later, you don't discover little surprises that throw everything off.<p>For example: Don't indent. Kindle auto-indents when converted if indentation hasn't been defined in the style. (The official Kindle will, and only currently, who knows if it'll change in the future, and a Mobi generator generally doesn't.) So using TAB indents throughout a book instead of MS Word's feature will cause a massive headache just when you think you're done.<p>Since I work on Windows, the tools can be rather simple. Create a document in MS word. Save as a web page (filtered) - to remove some of the junk word creates in html. Edit the html to remove a couple other quirks, set tags for chapters, remove unicode that Kindle won't recognize (some are, some aren't), save, convert, and check what you missed. The less special your document has to look, the easier it'll be.<p>Again, congratulations, welcome to the world of self-publishing. It can give a nightmare of a headache, but once it's done, the joy of knowing you created something on your own is magical.
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ilamontover 12 years ago
Great review. I was not aware of Bookshop, thanks for sharing your deep-dive into using it and other tools.<p>I began writing ebooks over the summer. To date, I have written four educational/reference titles around a theme -- "In 30 Minutes". The idea is to let newbies quickly understand a mildly complex topic. The most recent title is <i>The $10 Small Business Website In 30 Minutes</i> (1).<p>Not only do these books contain lots of screenshots and detailed TOCs, I also publish them in multiple formats -- .mobi, ePub, PDF, and PDF for paperback.<p>Unfortunately, I discovered that the most popular writing tools -- Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and Apple Pages, are not up to the task of creating ebook files across all of the platforms. Even if they can export to a certain format, there are limitations that force additional production and conversion steps. I also encountered the problem of forked masters, when I had to use different tools for exporting/converting to special formats.<p>Currently, I am using Google Docs for composition and collaboration with my copy editor. I then copy and paste the text into Scrivener (2), which is the most powerful writing and publishing tool I have ever used. It exports to .mobi, ePub, PDF, and print book PDF. Like TFA, I use Kindle Previewer to test the .mobi files. The ePub files need some mild HTML cleanup, which I do in Sigil (3).<p>1. <a href="http://10dollarsmallbusinesswebsite.com/" rel="nofollow">http://10dollarsmallbusinesswebsite.com/</a><p>2: <a href="http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php</a><p>3: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/sigil/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/sigil/</a>
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__mharrison__over 12 years ago
Thanks for sharing this info.<p>As a Python developer and ebook writer I've gone a similar route. I'm currently writing in emacs using reStructuredText as my base format and have written code to generate [0] clean epubs which translate to mobi/kf8 pretty well. Part of this is a CSS file I'm working on [1] to make common formatting "just work" across the big ebook readers (old-kindles, newer kindles, ipads, nook and kobo).<p>I've spent a little bit of time (and money) getting very nice pdf generation working using sphinx and the memoir class for latex. It's not there yet as I've been focusing on the ebooks.<p>Yes, it feels like you need to be a programmer to create ebooks right now. You definitely need to feel comfortable editing html and css. I'm not completely happy with rst as the base format, but I don't think there is another lightweight markup language specifically targeted to authoring books. Even sphinx which is supposed to be for documentation isn't really well suited towards books. So there's little hacks here and there. Plus as I usually write about Python related material, rst lets me "test" my books using doctest and I can even templatize some stuff (I'm doing that in a book I'm currently working on).<p>0 - <a href="https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2epub2" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2epub2</a><p>1 - <a href="https://github.com/mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit</a>
dangoorover 12 years ago
I've published some children's fiction this year, but I suspect I will publish programming works again at some point.<p>I'll give another plug for Scrivener[1], which is really a great tool. All of the editions that I have in the major online bookstores come straight out of Scrivener (though I obviously used an image editor for the covers).<p>I wanted to also mention out awesome Leanpub[2] is. Write your files in Markdown (and they support code snippets well... definitely a service that works well for software topics), save them in Dropbox. Press a couple of buttons in your browser and you've got PDF, mobi and epub. And, you can sell right away and keep 90% - 50 cents. They make it easy to publish early in the process and keep readers up to date as you complete the work.<p>One bonus that's not as obvious: Leanpub also makes distribution to a sample audience easy. You can generate coupon codes trivially.<p>I'm planning to go straight to Leanpub with my next technical work.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php</a> [2]: <a href="http://leanpub.com/" rel="nofollow">http://leanpub.com/</a>
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krogerover 12 years ago
Interesting. I agree that using something like Pages or Scrivener (I <i>love</i> Scrivener) can help you to focus on the writing and I wish I could have used them to write my book [1].<p>However, I'm curious to know how he handled code examples; did he just pasted them in Pages? One advantage of using something like Sphinx is to be able to include code examples from external files. This makes it easy to update and test the examples. Another killer feature is pyobject: it allows you to include only a Python function or class from a larger file. It'd be nice to have this feature for other languages, though.<p>I blogged about using Sphinx to write my book here: <a href="http://pedrokroger.net/2012/10/using-sphinx-to-write-books/" rel="nofollow">http://pedrokroger.net/2012/10/using-sphinx-to-write-books/</a><p>[1] <a href="http://musicforgeeksandnerds.com" rel="nofollow">http://musicforgeeksandnerds.com</a>
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arocksover 12 years ago
It would be interesting to compare this with another author's experience [1] using Sphinx. He also notes that EPUB and MOBI outputs are more challenging than PDF ones.<p>[1]: <a href="http://pedrokroger.net/2012/10/using-sphinx-to-write-books/" rel="nofollow">http://pedrokroger.net/2012/10/using-sphinx-to-write-books/</a>
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robomartinover 12 years ago
Thanks for sharing. I recently launched into writing an ebook (educational, kids). Even though I use Word for tons of stuff I became concerned that it would insert all sorts of unwanted junk into the file. I looked around and decided to start the process on Sigil. My reasoning was that I could easily move the text into just about any other platform if I wanted to.<p>My first impulse was to simply write it all in a plain text editor and deal with formatting and producing all the various file types later on. One file per chapter, etc. However, with Sigil I can deal with images and TOC from the very start, which might be an advantage.<p>It's interesting to read about how other's have approached this. It sounds like the toughest part of the job might very well be getting the various formats to look the way they should.
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zio99over 12 years ago
It seems there's a huge opening in the market to make an end-to-end publishing solution. We're all taking this scrappy approach* to making our books work cross-device. It's something I'd gladly pay for.<p>*I wrote about my pipeline here: <a href="http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/36675629669/format-ebook" rel="nofollow">http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/36675629669/format-e...</a>
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davidwover 12 years ago
This article is a great example of why LiberWriter has been doing fairly well. Most of us here understand it and think it's pretty cool. Imagine your mother or father, who have retired and decided to finally write that book they've always thought of trying to parse all of that. Gems? XML? Say what?
zrailover 12 years ago
I hadn't heard of Bookshop before, that's pretty neat.<p>&#60;shameless plug&#62;<p>I put together a project named Docverter that uses pandoc and calibre to do a bunch of this stuff. The conversions work pretty well, and it's all free.<p><a href="http://www.docverter.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.docverter.com</a><p>&#60;/shameless plug&#62;
dpapathanasiouover 12 years ago
Doesn't Pages export to epub?
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