{"id":251,"date":"2008-12-21T00:59:53","date_gmt":"2008-12-21T05:59:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=251"},"modified":"2025-07-25T18:19:20","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T23:19:20","slug":"creating-ebooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/creating-ebooks\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating e-books"},"content":{"rendered":"
Note: I cross-posted this on Publishing Renaissance on December 24, 2008.<\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking about offering a quick\u2019n\u2019dirty series on how to create various ebook formats, wondering if independent publishers (or even micro- and small presses) know how to disseminate their wares effectively in electronic format. I know PDF is the fallback position and while I have a love\/hate relationship with PDF (formatting, yay! reading on computer, boo! hiss!), most people who don\u2019t have an ebook reading device pretty much are stuck with the computer.<\/p>\n

(This is one reason I have issues with places like Lulu, iUniverse, AuthorHouse, etc. Their electronic delivery is exclusively PDF. I don\u2019t know if the authors have the option to create other formats or even if they\u2019re inclined to do so, but I urge those indies who choose such providers to check it out and diversify.)<\/p>\n

Smashwords<\/a> has a grinder program that allows you to upload your document and then spits out various electronic incarnations of it, but it has formatting issues, which is to say, some it ain\u2019t pretty especially if you have a not-very-well-formatted RTF document to begin with. Oh well and get over it. They do a marvelous job with what they get and it\u2019s a few hundred steps in the right direction\u2014not to mention the fact that once you get it on your ebook reading device, it probably won\u2019t make you any difference.<\/p>\n

But in case you do want to know how it\u2019s done (or, more properly, how we did it, properly or not), what tools we used, why\u2014and we invite others to correct us on more efficient ways to do it (that doesn\u2019t involve Book Designer, thanks)\u2014here\u2019s the first and most important thing you have to do:<\/p>\n

Learn XHTML and CSS. Really.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Reilly at Tools of Change is pushing for all formats to be based on XML, but if you\u2019re reading this post, this is probably a DIY project and XHTML is, IMO, easier to learn. You will need this for every format you might want to offer (except PDB [Palm] and as an ebook application [iApp] to be sold in the iTunes store).<\/p>\n

After that, it\u2019s all tweaks and about 6 different pieces of (almost free) software.<\/p>\n

Go on now and learn XHTML and CSS. I\u2019m not going to post tutorials on that when others have done it better than I.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note: I cross-posted this on Publishing Renaissance on December 24, 2008. I\u2019ve been thinking about offering a quick\u2019n\u2019dirty series on how to create various ebook formats, wondering if independent publishers (or even micro- and small presses) know how to disseminate their wares effectively in electronic format. I know PDF is the fallback position and while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[529,531,544,525],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-production","category-books-2","category-bookselling","category-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15089,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions\/15089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}