The Happy Curmudgeon

An update on this topic. I still can find no indication that one can sell adobe acrobat pdf files on amazon, or at least there seems to be no obvious way (I’ll look into whether one can sell pdf files as an associated merchant, and/or via self-publishing hard copy books).

As for Kindle book preparation, I’ve learned a lot but not much of it is good news for people who have books all nicely formatted in anything but html.

The Kindle and other ebook formats seem to all be variants of html (the stuff that’s used to code websites), and sadly, it’s ability to do precision layouts is limited. No doubt if ereaders succeed, we’ll get better formats to work with, but right now, you can’t really do straight conversions from, let’s say, a page layout format (such as pdf, or MS publisher, or other adobe products), to ebook/kindle without a lot of work.

In essence the only way to be sure that the products are usable on the Kindle is to go through line by line, code tag by code tag, from the html before conversion to Kindle. I haven’t tried direct from Word to Kindle, but I’ve heard bad things.

There’s a sorta explanation why this is the case, but it’s a bit goofy.

What we do is we take our book/publication from its source, save the text to Word (without graphics), output it to html, then edit it and then convert it with the mobipocket tool. There’s other ways.

Our documents are relatively simple, but I’d estimate conversion of a complex graphically rich book of several hundred pages will probably take weeks, at least if it is your first try.

If you have something to add or correct, please share.