Formatting your eBook for Kindle and Kindle Fire

So I spent a great deal of time trying to get my picture heavy book to look good with the original Kindle only to have it look horrible on the Kindle Fire. What? I had originally written the book using Google Docs. That turned out well. But it turns out, first, all of my images needed to be jpg and not png. My screen capture program defaults to png and I just assumed it being an Internet standard it would not be an issue. I was more focused on finishing the book that what the guidelines would be to make my book into an eBook for publishing on different sites. My book looks the best as a good old fashioned PDF, but since Amazon and Barnes and Noble both have their own style guides and their own variations on ePub/mobi, I need to format accordingly. The first time I exported my Google Doc version of my document as zipped (html).

So then I ran IrfranView to convert all of my png files to 80% jpg. I then did a find and replace on my png to jpg and opened the html file in Chrome. It worked. So then I downloaded the Amazon Kindle Preview which you can find here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621 On that page you can download Amazon Kindle Preview and their command line eBook generator. You can also download a template for Adobe InDesign. Sadly I am still running CS3 of the Adobe Creative Suite so my version is too old to use it. But with just the Preview program you can generate a mobi file from your html or epub and view it in simulations for the original Kindle, Kindle DX, Kindle White, and Kindle Fire and HD.

When I originally did this I noticed my chapters didn't seem to be breaking like I wanted. Also it was doing a number on tables I had in the document and on some pictures. So I went and added more page breaks before chapters to try and address this. Before I did that, my book looked passable though my cover was not pretty. After reading this guys blog http://www.cjs-easy-as-pie.com/2010/03/kindle-cover-format.html I discovered my cover image needed to be 600x800 and it would go all around the edges of the Kindle screen. So it looks good that way. But it stretched my existing image so I have to go to Gimp and create a new properly sized cover image.

 Another blog that I found some help on what this guy's blog http://www.paulsalvette.com which is really about epublishing and his book, The eBook Design and Development Guide [Kindle Edition] It is a really good book and it shows me I have some work to do in order to make my book look best in all formats. But I can tell you after I added lots and lots of page breaks, my book looks horrible in Kindle Fire formats but looks pretty good in Kindle, DX, and White. So I am going to undo all the work I did and start over on the formatting. #ebooks #kindle Conversely I attempted to publish my book on Leanpub.com. But it wants me to do some much formatting changes that I would rather devote my time to getting the Kindle version right.

Ultimately I want to release my book in a DRM free version. Part of me says, offer the book on Amazon to get sales and then send pdf versions to anyone who proves they bought my book. And perhaps if I can build a following I can get added to O'Reilly Press which sells all of their books DRM free. I want my books to be usable on every device and in ever format. Sure, I don't want people sharing my book with everybody, but to lock a book down to one single device is wrong.