Category Archives: Kindle book design

Book Publishing With InDesign CC: Spiral-bound

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Even after over forty-five years, there’s still that little thrill when you see a finished book for the first time. It’s too bad that Amazon won’t carry them. But, they are the best choice for the classroom or self-study. The spiral-bound workbook I had to cut out the Christian marketing section to get the page count below the 470 page maximum for spiral-bound. The only thing I really miss are the color graphics. To get that (and … Continue reading →

Page Layout Part 5: Graphic needs of the formats

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Graphic needs for Print, PDF, ePUB, & Kindle KFX For book publishing, what you need to understand about graphics is how usage varies in the different formats. You’ll need to hand-adjust to produce the graphics for the various formats. Automation causes many problems. I’m just going to list the four options and their requirements, best formats, and so on. Greyscale print with color cover Lulu & Createspace, plus professional on-demand like Lightning source: You need to be careful. … Continue reading →

Pictures on Kindle remains a crap shoot

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I don’t do this as often as I should (read other people’s books on self-publishing). It’s not because I don’t think they have good things to offer. Mainly it’s the result of a reasoning and a fact. First, I don’t want to accidentally plagiarize someone while writing. So, I tend to keep others’ writing out of the memory banks. Second, most non-fiction on book publishing is far too expensive for my little budget. But I picked up a copy … Continue reading →

Enhanced typesetting and new inaccessible Kindle format?

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Back to scratching mud Aaron Shepherd is convinced that this is true. The .kfx (which Aaron believes stands for .kf10) is a post-uploading process done to your books over the first month or two after uploading. What it means as far as he is concerned is this: In practical terms, this means there is no longer any effective way to proof your book before or after publication. You can get it looking absolutely perfect in a KDP proof, and … Continue reading →

More on Kindle Problems…

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A continuation of the Kindle formatting issues On one of the Facebook groups I participate in, there’s been some general poo-pahing over my most recent posting on the problems with Kindle formatting. I can understand it because many in that group only upload very simple novels. But the problem may be worse than I thought. So, I thought I better give some samples. In the process I found that Kindle has indeed destroyed the Kindle version of this … Continue reading →

Is it time to bail on Kindle?

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Aaron Shephard is close to giving up in Kindle. [You may need to search as I could not find a post-specific link.] He’s found evidence that Amazon might, and probably will, destroy your formatting well after it has been published. As you can read below about the new KFX format, Amazon simply does that to your book. It’s out of our control and we have been given no tools to produce KFX files.   I suspected all of this, … Continue reading →

InDesign CC 2015 offers paragraph shading in ePUBs

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Another incremental release? Of course… But that’s to be expected. The whole paradigm of the subscription model is that the applications keep getting better and you get an automatic update as soon as it is released. There’s been a huge amount of work put into InDesign CC (2015), but most of it does not apply to us: producers of the artwork published as books in print and as ebooks. However, one of the new abilities is very helpful. It … Continue reading →

The Kindle fixed layout software moves books

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As I mentioned a while ago, I made textbook versions of my two best sellers: Practical Font Design and Writing in InDesign. The process was very simple and easy. I just uploaded the PDF I had developed for download. It had a bit of color added, but it is basically the print version slightly optimized for viewing on-screen. The conversion was very fast and seemingly flawless. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, it’s just a wrapped PDF so far, with … Continue reading →

Ebooks have made a major leap in quality

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For example, I got this official word today: “Yes, Kobo now accepts FXL EPUBs exported from InDesign and they can be put on sale, they have confirmed the same. The FXL EPUB output from ID also renders correctly on a Kobo device.” Now that is certainly good news which is to be added with the existing iBooks acceptance of ePUB3 books. But the real change has happened more subtly. All distributors now accept ebooks with embedded fonts I … Continue reading →

Guest post: The future of ebooks by Michael W. Perry at inklingbooks.com

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Michael’s comments are worth reading I didn’t ask his permission this time, but this is an excellent comment by Michael in reply to my posting about the probable need to go back to using Amazon’s Kindle Export plug-in in InDesign CS6. Michael’s comments are again right on target as far as I can tell. My only hope is that someone at Amazon reads them. Many thanks for such a detailed explanation. My main take-way is that Amazon … Continue reading →