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The eBook Design and Development Guide
While eBook sales continue to increase around the world, the actual layout and presentation of eBooks is in a sorry state. Mangled formatting, defective images, and non-reflowable content are just a few symptoms of the problem. Many publishing houses and independent authors believe that converting an eBook directly from Word, InDesign, or another publishing program will produce a “good enough” eBook. However, poor sales and poor reviews from readers suggests otherwise.The eBook Design and Development Guide is a technical reference for serious publishers and authors who want to produce professional eBooks with a focus on quality. This guide provides all the technical knowledge of HTML, CSS, EPUB, XML, and KindleGen that is necessary to create your eBook from a source manuscript into an eBook ready for sale at all the major eBook vendors, including the Amazon Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, and the iBookstore.No prior experience is required and the process of eBook production requires no expensive third-party software. This guide will teach you how to master the following • Converting your manuscript into HTML• Adding hyperlinks, bullets, and tables to your eBook• Embedding correctly-sized images in your eBook• Creating a clickable Table of Contents for your eBook• Adding basic presentation and styling to your eBook with CSS such as font sizing, margins, and indentation• Embedding fonts in your eBook• Adding advanced styling to your eBook such as gradients, drop caps, and backgrounds• Creating a professional EPUB eBook that validates with EpubCheck• Creating a professional MOBI/KF8 eBook with KindleGen• Adding metadata into your eBook• Working with regular expressions for quickly converting an eBookAdditionally, the guide provides a step-by-step walkthrough for a sample conversion of an eBook, as well as some helpful tips on the publishing and marketing process. All HTML, CSS, and EPUB templates are available for immediate use in this guide so you can start making your eBook for Kindle, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, and all the other major platforms.This book is a follow-up to the author’s How to Format Your eBook for Kindle, NOOK, Smashwords, and Everything Else with much more details on HTML, CSS, and the EPUB standard. It also explains how to properly design an eBook for the new Kindle Format 8 (KF8) devices such as the Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, and Paperwhite.Buy this 65,000-word guide that contains 150 images and 200 code snippets, and you will be able to create professional eBooks that really stand out from the crowd.
390 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 23, 2012
11 people are currently reading
18 people want to read
About the author
Paul Salvette
12 books8 followersPaul Salvette is an author who lives in Bangkok, Thailand with his wife, Lisa, and newborn daughter, Monica. He grew up in the United States and served in the Navy from 2002 to 2009, with some time in Iraq. His day job involves working at a Thai foundation that focuses on poverty eradication, philanthropy, and education. He hopes to stay in Thailand until he is deported or dies of natural causes, whichever comes first.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 25, 2019
I found this book very helpful for a side project I was working on. I was glad I had the Kindle version because I often had to search to find the aspect I wanted. Sometimes I felt like the material was disorganized as some pieces show up in several areas. I liked how Salvette offered honest information if something wasn't going to work on certain devices and gave "best scenario" workarounds when needed.
May 24, 2019
Muy recomendable si quieres maquetar con limpieza, elegancia y control tus libros electrónicos.
June 20, 2014
So, I learned about this book from a friend who knew I was in need of some help learning how to go about formatting my book for the Kindle. I came away from it with mixed feelings. It's very useful in some ways, and quite frustrating in other ways.
First of all, the front part of the book is essentially a crash course in html and css. He covers all kinds of things, including tables, which might be useful for someone doing a text book, but for the average person putting together a novel, it's something that can be skipped. If you're like me and have a decent grasp of html and css, you can skip the first quarter of the book entirely.
After that he goes over the steps in stripping your Word document down to the bare bones so you don't have a bunch of formatting junk screwing up your text file. This is all very useful, for the person doing this sort of thing for the first time. He goes on from there having you set stuff up in your editor of choice (I used Notepad++), how to ensure your chapter breaks are clean, how to add things like drop caps, etc. Then you have to try to convert it to epub, check for errors, and all the other little annoyances of getting things just right.
This section if followed by essentially a rewrite of everything you just did, except certain parts are explained better in either the first version or this version. I found myself popping back and forth between sections depending on what I was doing. That made things a bit more confusing, especially when he was inconsistent with what he was calling the epub file. There were a couple of times when I thought he was using a command instead of referring to the name of the file I was converting.
Lastly, this book could use an update. It was put out in 2012 and some things have changed. For example, he makes a big deal about how limited you are in terms of file size, and how you have to keep your images as small as possible. Amazon has pretty much done away with this limitation, raising the image file size to 5mg.
Of the books available for this sort of thing, I believe this one is the best. He also makes available templates that you can use to speed up the process of setting up things like your css file. They were very handy. I waffled on giving this book four stars, but because of the outdated information in some cases, and the annoyance of having to move around the book to find the best information, I'm docking it a star.
First of all, the front part of the book is essentially a crash course in html and css. He covers all kinds of things, including tables, which might be useful for someone doing a text book, but for the average person putting together a novel, it's something that can be skipped. If you're like me and have a decent grasp of html and css, you can skip the first quarter of the book entirely.
After that he goes over the steps in stripping your Word document down to the bare bones so you don't have a bunch of formatting junk screwing up your text file. This is all very useful, for the person doing this sort of thing for the first time. He goes on from there having you set stuff up in your editor of choice (I used Notepad++), how to ensure your chapter breaks are clean, how to add things like drop caps, etc. Then you have to try to convert it to epub, check for errors, and all the other little annoyances of getting things just right.
This section if followed by essentially a rewrite of everything you just did, except certain parts are explained better in either the first version or this version. I found myself popping back and forth between sections depending on what I was doing. That made things a bit more confusing, especially when he was inconsistent with what he was calling the epub file. There were a couple of times when I thought he was using a command instead of referring to the name of the file I was converting.
Lastly, this book could use an update. It was put out in 2012 and some things have changed. For example, he makes a big deal about how limited you are in terms of file size, and how you have to keep your images as small as possible. Amazon has pretty much done away with this limitation, raising the image file size to 5mg.
Of the books available for this sort of thing, I believe this one is the best. He also makes available templates that you can use to speed up the process of setting up things like your css file. They were very handy. I waffled on giving this book four stars, but because of the outdated information in some cases, and the annoyance of having to move around the book to find the best information, I'm docking it a star.
January 1, 2015
Not so much for beginners, still a good reference and guide.
First I will say that this book provided exactly what I needed it to, which is a thorough and inclusive guide for ebook best practices. I had used free online resources for several weeks before getting this book, and I probably would have saved myself considerable time and effort by starting with this book.
However, I felt the appropriate audience was not well targeted in this book, and I question its organizational structure. The first half of the book is set up to give readers a crash course in html, css, and regular expressions. I found myself very grateful that I was already very familiar with html and css (needing the book more as a reference for the particular quirks and subtleties of ebook coding), as I felt that Salvette frequently did not explain terms adequately or explain why something worked the way it did. It seemed as though someone at the skill level he tried to write for would be hopelessly lost, while those who could use his information might feel talked-down to. This is why I felt his audience was not well addressed.
The second half was a walk-through of the process of converting a manuscript to a functional and aesthetically pleasing ebook. This was a little odd to me as I had taken note of many best-practices that were noted in the first half, making changes to my book as I went, and then ended up backtracking and reworking some things as I read the second half. Some of these best-practices were rehashed in the second half, but many others were not. The result is that this book seemed disjointed and slightly unwieldy. There is good organization in the table of contents and navigation systems, but I can't help but feel like I'd have to cross reference several different chapters to be sure I'd gotten the complete picture.
First I will say that this book provided exactly what I needed it to, which is a thorough and inclusive guide for ebook best practices. I had used free online resources for several weeks before getting this book, and I probably would have saved myself considerable time and effort by starting with this book.
However, I felt the appropriate audience was not well targeted in this book, and I question its organizational structure. The first half of the book is set up to give readers a crash course in html, css, and regular expressions. I found myself very grateful that I was already very familiar with html and css (needing the book more as a reference for the particular quirks and subtleties of ebook coding), as I felt that Salvette frequently did not explain terms adequately or explain why something worked the way it did. It seemed as though someone at the skill level he tried to write for would be hopelessly lost, while those who could use his information might feel talked-down to. This is why I felt his audience was not well addressed.
The second half was a walk-through of the process of converting a manuscript to a functional and aesthetically pleasing ebook. This was a little odd to me as I had taken note of many best-practices that were noted in the first half, making changes to my book as I went, and then ended up backtracking and reworking some things as I read the second half. Some of these best-practices were rehashed in the second half, but many others were not. The result is that this book seemed disjointed and slightly unwieldy. There is good organization in the table of contents and navigation systems, but I can't help but feel like I'd have to cross reference several different chapters to be sure I'd gotten the complete picture.
March 30, 2014
A comprehensive overview of the steps involved in developing an ebook.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews