After a long sojourn making and taking care of web sites, a few opportunities came my way to format books for print again. It’s been a long time. Some things have changed. Most things have not.
One of the things that has NOT changed is that few people know how to format books in a very basic way using common production software. What has changed is what we read. First it was printed books. Now it’s pdf, web/html, Kindle/mobi, and increasingly ePub format. Some of the software is mature and common, other software is very new and still evolving. The newest formats are very primitive in a lot of ways.
It starts with a word processor. After all words are what we are trying to publish. Words to explain, persuade, inspire–communicate. Words arranged nicely on a page or computer screen to help us understand.
I am involved with an ongoing set of projects for a small book publisher. These folks have a pretty good handle on clean word processing as a result of a solid editorial process. These projects go through InDesign into Acrobat pdf files through the proofing cycle until one day they tell me this is final and it goes off to the printer.
We have taken a hand-full of these books to the Kindle using a menagerie of software to get to the final destination–the Amazon Kindle store using one sequence of operations. Another branch of the sequence takes the book to ePub format that can be read by the other electronic readers and computers using “reader” software. I can read ePub books on my iPod Touch without going through the Apple Store.
So here’s the deal. I am going to explain and demonstrate how to take a “book” from the raw manuscript through:
- The editorial process
- Create the “master” book
- Create the pdf file (the first published output)
- Out to a commercial printer (the second published output)
- How to print it yourself (the third and most satisfying)
- How to create a web version (the fourth and the basis for the other electronic formats)
- How to use the web version and get it on your Kindle (or everyone’s)(fifth)
- How to use the web version to create ePub files for your Nook, Sony Reader, Apple iPad (hopefully), and more than a few other PC and Mac readers (sixth published version)
Yeah! That sounds like a pretty good series.