e-book Conversions (technical)

Take Pride in Your eBook Formatting – or Hire a Professional

Melbourne

Melbourne

In his blog author and ebook professional Guido Henkel rants about sub-par quality of ebooks. He wrote, starting a series of introduction to ebook formatting:

“To me, one of the key elements that sets apart a professional eBook release from that of an amateur has always been the technical presentation of the book. Sure, anyone can write a document in a word processor, run it through some export tool, use a fully automated conversion utility or peruse the services of an online service, but the sad fact of the matter is that none of these approaches typically results in, what I call, production-level digital books.

I will never again touch the book of an author who has made a bad impression on me by delivering a broken eBook that is clearly sub-par. I can forgive many things in a book if I so please — stilted language, poor pacing, logical errors, uneven style, even the occasional typo. However, one thing I cannot forgive is poor eBook formatting, particularly if it is to the point that it becomes distracting from the actual reading experience, and sadly I have seen too many of these in recent memory.

Many authors simply don’t know any better. They write their book, complete it and look for the fastest, cheapest and easiest way to deploy it. Don’t be one of those authors! It is a sad testimony in my opinion, and certainly not a valid excuse. You have labored over your book for months, maybe even years, you have read and re-read it countless times, cleaned out typos and grammatical errors, massaged the style and worked on the structure, grinding away in the wee hours of the night alongside holding a daytime job and maybe having a family. You did not get here just to break the first cardinal rule of book publishing: Don’t get sloppy on the home stretch! It will reflect poorly on your work.

Another reason why many authors never take the time to create proper, optimized eBooks is that they are perhaps intimidated by the process. It is a technical process, to be sure, but it is nothing to shy away from or to be afraid of. All it requires is a very basic sense of structure and sequencing, things we’ve all been taught since first grade and that we have down pat.”

Read more: http://guidohenkel.com

Bravo ! Amazon ! Finally !

Kindle Fire

Kindle Fire

Suddenly e-books are much better looking…

Amazon released its Kindle Fire, and the company is already working on tweaking its vast collection of eBooks for maximum compatibility with the Kindle Fire. 

Amazon is retiring its MOBI format in favour of the new .KF8 format (or Kindle Format 8), including support for 150 new formatting tags, which include HTML5 and CSS support.

The eCommerce giant had in the past used and supported Mobi 7. 

HTML5 is quickly becoming the new web standard so it is not a total surprise to hear that Amazon is moving in this direction.  Amazon will convert all existing content into the .KF8 format, and users also have the option of updating existing titles they have on their Kindle ebook readers and Kindle readers on other mobile platforms.

Amazon is also releasing a new set of Kindle Publishing Guidelines, which ebook authors and publishers should take into consideration when building their content for distribution via Amazon!

This is where a professional formatting / conversion company gives helpful support to authors and self-publishers. Publishers will also need to update their titles in order to use the new format.

The new Amazon Kindle format will ideally support a wider array of devices, and not just Amazon’s proprietary Kindle ebook reader. The new format also allows for more versatile formatting, as well as a more portable format. The company is said to be looking for a replacement for its .MOBI format, and this seems to be it.

 

 

BookCountry / Penguin – are they serious?

 

For $549 they will format your ebook / print book, and then upload it to retailers  –  or for $299 they will let you DO YOUR OWN formatting, and then they will upload the book to retailers. Huh?

Formatting ebooks / paper books is tricky and should be done by a professional – but then uploading to CreateSpace, Kindle, Nook, and Apple takes about an hour for FREE and you’re done. You’re on the sales websites. Why would you pay Penguin $ 299 for one hour to upload your titles? Plus give them 30% commission on each book sold???

More details of their “publishing offer”  http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/11/book-country-fail.html

Bravo ! Amazon ! Finally !

Suddenly e-books are much better looking…

Amazon is releasing “Kindle Fire” by mid-November, and the company is already working on tweaking its immense collection of e-books for maximum compatibility with the Kindle Fire.

Amazon is actually retiring their MOBI format in favor of the new .KF8 format (or Kindle Format 8), this includes support for 150 new formatting tags, supporting HTML5 and CSS. This is quite a shift in direction for the eCommerce giant from supporting MOBI 7.  HTML5 is quickly becoming the new web standard and Amazon is moving in this direction.

They will convert all existing content into the .KF8 format, and users also have the option of updating existing titles they have on their Kindle ebook readers and Kindle readers on other mobile platforms.

 

 

KindleFire

KindleFire

 

Amazon is also releasing a new set of Kindle Publishing Guidelines, which ebook authors and publishers should take into consideration when building their content for distribution via Amazon.

This is where a professional formatting/conversion company gives helpful support to authors and self-publishers.  Publishers will need to update their titles in order to use the new format.

The new Amazon Kindle format will ideally support a wider array of devices, and not just Amazon’s proprietary Kindle ebook reader. The new format also allows for more versatile formatting, as well as a more portable format. The company is said to be looking for a replacement for its .MOBI format, and this seems to be it.

 

 

77 Reasons Why Your Book Was Rejected

77 Reasons77 Reasons Why Your Book Was Rejected
by Mike Nappa, available as e-book and paper book at Amazon.

The author’s experiences as acquisitions editor, marketing copywriter, and literary agent uniquely qualify  him to write on this topic. The book is divided into three sections: Editorial , Marketing  and Sales Reasons for Rejection.

An editor is going to look at your proposal – and if it doesn’t meet certain editorial standards, it will go no farther. If it passes basic editorial scrutiny, an editor will then consider whether you’ve done your “marketing” homework — analyzed and defined your audience, established a platform, shown that you know how and why this book will sell. From there, the editor will need to convince the publisher that they can sell this book, and sell enough to merit the investment in its publication.

Perhaps the clearest message that emerges from this book is that getting published is a lot of work. The job doesn’t end when you finish writing the last chapter. Publishers are in the business of selling a product, and it’s your job to convince them that your book will sell.

Or maybe you will decide to go it on your own. After all you have to do your book marketing anyway, even if your book is accepted by a commercial publisher.

 

Why e-Books often Look so Ugly


Many e-books I downloaded are riddled with typographical and formatting errors, the result of the process that translates the files publishers use to print physical books. Another reason is that authors are trying to DIY their e-book formatting instead of using a professional formatting company – who charge often only between a hundred or two-hundred dollars for a fiction book.

The problems range from strange gaps in the middle of a sentence to hyphens that are inserted in inappropriate places and the odd period is missing, not to mention all the typs that are a result of not using a professional editing service. E-books today are where the web was in its early years.  These mistakes, both distract and detract from the reading experience, and readers get the impression that no one is paying attention to the quality of e-books. Try a Google search for “Kindle typos”, it will yield more than a million hits.

Part of the problem is that some formats do not have a way to ensure that blocks of computer code remains intact and properly formatted.The better ePub format is based on the XML and CSS standards and is used in millions of web pages and allows for far more control over layouts than is currently possible with the .mobi file format.

The best course, if you want a nicely formatted Kindle book that provides a pleasant reading experience, is to create an HTML file with CSS and then carefully manipulate that code to get the display you want. Or hire an e-book formatter or conversion company.

Hopefully, as e-book readers get more popular, they will become more sophisticated, bringing in e-book designers that understand a changing world of digital publishing and creating beautiful books with layout design and fonts that are so important in publishing as we know it from paper books. Your readers may very well notice the difference.

Bad Formatting = Bad Book Reviews

Readers are losing patience with e-books that are

  • full of typos
  • lost “Italics” 
  • use redundant words
  • have no paragraph breaks or indents
  • page numbers that end up in the middle of the page (note: e-books are page-less)
  • page numbers are all over the site on content pages (that should be linked to the chapters) … and the list goes on and on. 
Sony E-Book Library

Sony E-Book Library

These sloppily formatted e-books compromise the reading experience and customers will give them a bad review. Authors may be finding out about it too late themselves – the hard way. Failure to deliver a quality e-book format is adversely affecting reviews. If you are selling me a sub standard product you won’t get a 5 star rating from me, no matter how exceptional the story is!

Many publishers, even those claiming they are specialists in the self-publishing world, just upload the PDF file, which they previously used to have the book printed.  The problem is not just limited to little-known authors. Many of the e-books released today that were written by author super stars suffer these same indignities. Unless the user is reading with a PDF reader, PDF files do NOT make good e-book files.  Reading a PDF on a screen is usually annoying – unless formatted for that purpose. You can’t fit the traditional page at the traditional font size on a computer screen and expect it to be easily readable.

How to prevent these potential disasters?
Your book needs to be properly formatted and available in as many media types, to have it read by the broadest audience. One of the first steps in self-publishing is getting your manuscript ready for upload to the publishing channels that you have selected – hopefully all of them, if you want your e-book to be a real success.

For maximum exposure, it needs to be available in perfect form in all of the e-book platforms, including the Kindle, the Nook, the Sony e-book reader and the iPad. Sounds easy? After all, it’s just text and the upload must be simple. Sorry, there are no standards and there are no common word processing file types.  Instead there is ePub, Sony Reader LRF, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kindle .mobi, Apple iPad…

Spend the $200 or so and get it properly formatted for a variety of e-Readers. Just google for “e-book formatting”, “e-book developers”, “e-book designer” or “e-book conversions”.  But BEFORE let it proof-read and edit by a professional. Do everything to present your customers a great e-book reading experience and they will write 5-star reviews.

700g iPad instead of 17 Kilo Paper for Pilots

Airplane landing

United Airlines, Continental and Alaska Airlines are replacing the hefty flight manuals and chart books its pilots have long used with 11,000 iPads carrying the same data.

The 0.7 kilogram iPad will take the place of about 17 kilograms of paper instructions, data and charts pilots have long used to help guide them, parent company United Continental Holdings said.

The popular tablet computer will carry the Mobile FliteDeck software app from Jeppesen, a Boeing subsidiary which provides navigation tools for air, sea and land.

Read more:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10747192

Heavy Pilot Case

Heavy Pilot Case

e-Books Deserve Better

Amazon Kindle DX

Why do e-books need professional editing and careful conversion?  And why do I have to close some e-books in disgust? Have a look at an email I just sent to a PCWorld writer:

“… Better advice your readers in self-publishing articles to get a professional editor, or at least an English language professional, to polish the text of their upcoming book.  Your advice to use a spelling check or friends, family to prepare a book for e-publishing is not a good one. These sloppy and careless “authors”, who want to go on the “cheap” are bringing e-books in disrepute!”

I sometimes start to read an e-book and delete it in the first five minutes, because it is so full of typos and so badly conversed. Professional e-book conversion and book design don’t cost much.

What do you think?

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Hyper Smash

Amazon and epub? Hopefully soon

Amazon and ePub Format

The Amazon Kindle has exclusively sold books on its Amazon Bookstore in the Mobi format. Publishers have been told by the company that in the near-future, they should be submitting their books to Amazon in ePub format and not exclusively MOBI.

Soon the Kindle eReader will have the full capability to read ePub books. Amazon steps in the right direction. It also opens up a world of opportunities for publishers beyond the restrictions of the mobi format. The ePub format is the industry standard for e-book formats and almost every other online ebook store aside from Amazon sells their books in that format. With Amazon embracing ePub technology it confirms that ePub is by far the most popular format to read e-books.

Thanks to Amazon from us e-book designers!
And also thanks from every author.  In the future this will save them headaches and money.