Free Lynda.com Video: Creating Fixed-Layout eBooks for the Kindle
Depending on who you ask, Amazon has somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the US ebook market. So if you want to get your ebook in front of the most potential readers, you simply can’t ignore Amazon. But how do you learn the steps in the process for making ebooks to sell on Amazon? And how do you even decide what type of ebook is right for a particular project? Kevin Callahan’s Lynda.com course Creating Fixed-Layout eBooks for the Kindle is a great place to start.
Among the free videos offered, is this one on determining good candidates for fixed-layout ebooks. Check it out!
Good candidates for fixed-layout ebooks
For Lynda.com members, if you are currently signed in to your account, you can also check out these videos from the series.
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Exporting EPUB3 from InDesign CC 2015
Comparing the EPUB3 format vs. Kindle format
Using Kindle Previewer
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I couldn’t help but recall, as I watched those videos explain all the complexities of doing fixed-layout books for Kindles, how much easier doing the same with fixed-layout epub is. I simply choose that as an export option inside ID. Exporting for smaller screen sizes isn’t much harder. Simply create another page size for the document. More work, yes, but no CSS and HTML.
My reaction was much the same as Michael’s. As someone who muddled through learning how to tweak CSS to get InDesign to work creating EPUB files in CS5, CS 5.5 and CS6, I gladly left that behind with InDesign CC.
I’m happy I have no need to create Fixed Layout Kindle files but I’m glad that Kevin documented how to create them starting in InDesign. I’m already referring people to his video on the Adobe InDesign EPUB forum.
Amazon, by refusing to work with Adobe to bring their Kindle plug-in up-to-day, certainly doesn’t make life easy for authors and publishers. Fixed layout isn’t just for children’s books. It’s also great for textbooks, since that means the fixed-layout version mirrors the page numbering and layout of the more-expensive printed version.
I’ve even got a theory for what Amazon is so anti-standards and anti-easy book formatting. With perhaps 70% of the ebook market, they figure that, come what may, authors and publishers will have to create Kindle editions. By making the creation of those Kindle versions as troublesome and costly as possible, Amazon is hoping that many authors and publishers won’t have enough money left over for creating versions for other platforms. By playing the jerk, Amazon comes out ahead in an area it highly values, exclusive, Kindle-only editions.
Consciously or not, by working together to improve InDesign’s epub export capabilities, including that of fixed-layout, Adobe and Apple have negated Amazon’s scheme, at least for publishers who use ID to create their print edition. Once the print version done, the epub 3.0 versions are trivial to create.
It’s the Kindle edition that’s become the costly pain, troubled with a lot of hand-coding. Were I a major publisher, I’d adopt a policy of releasing the epub edition with the print edition and letting the Kindle edition come when it comes, even if that’s weeks later. Let Amazon pay a cost for being so stubbornly anti-standards and anti-ID plug-in.
I’m hoping that Amazon will realize that their scheme to deter publishers from creating ebooks for other platforms has backfired and either go with epub like all the clever people, or give us a powerful plug-in for creating the various Kindle formats from inside ID.
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If Mike is looking for a mind-stretching epub problem to solve, I’ve got one for him. Page layout programs, including ID, have a conditional text ability, allowing certain text to be included or not included in the exported print version. I’m wondering if epub can give READERS that same capability—meaning that the conditional display is decided by readers not the publisher. Conditional reading not conditional publishing.
I ask because I’m thinking of creating a digital edition of my Lord of the Rings chronology, Untangling Tolkien. The day-by-day tabulation of events by each character is what most of its readers would want. They don’t necessarily want to always see my additional commentary or the references to each event in LOTR. Pop-ups might do for the references but not for the commentary, which can run to several pages. Besides, I hate how Apple has implemented pop-ups in iBooks. It displays what no reader cares about, the footnote number, in a huge size with oodles of wasted whitespace, while placing what they do want at the bottom, almost always meaning readers must tediously scroll to read it. It’s an example of one of Apple’s vices, a pretty but dysfunctional design.
So, in a nutshell, I wonder if epub has the ability, as displayed by the common ereaders, to turn on or off parts of the text flow much like some websites do with HTML and little arrows. I realize that’s likely to only work in the reflowable format, but it doesn’t seem that hard a feature to implement, should the standard permit it.
The technique, if it exists, would also work well with graphics. Tap and a map or chart appears as part of the text flow. Tap again and it goes away. Just keep in mind that’s as part of an expanded text flow rather than as a clumsy pop-up that hides the text.