Our Five Rainbows Services company does a lot of Kindle conversions for small, indie publishers and self-published authors. Some of the source files we receive are easy to convert. Some are difficult.
Some, however, pose real problems that can be very costly to circumvent.
We never provide a firm quote on a conversion until we have reviewed whatever source files are available. Our preference is to start with a Microsoft Word or Open Office document (WordPerfect sometimes creates its own unique problems).
Often, we can get what we need from the PDF file submitted to a printer for a print edition, but too often the PDF is loaded with all kinds of problems, some of which stem directly from the way the InDesign file was created (and then used to generate the PDF). However, just as often, trying to extract the needed data from a PDF creates a whole new set of problems — extraneous hyphens and line breaks and headers/footers inserted on each page in line with the main text are the most common. Another common problem is the use of ligatures, as it is often impossible to extract them into readable text. Fixing all those errors can take a lot of time.
Sometimes, it proves easiest to pull what we need directly from the InDesign file…but that depends greatly on how the InDesign file was created.
So, if you’re designing books in InDesign and want to make it easy, and much less expensive, to convert those books to the Kindle format, here are a few things to consider.
- Use master pages for all running headers and footers. You’d be surprised at how many people — for reasons I don’t understand — try to insert the headers and footers individually on each page.
- Use defined styles for all formatting (particularly paragraph and character styles) as opposed to manually styling each one as you go. And give those styles names that make it obvious what the defined style is doing (e.g., “Chapter Title” or “Inline Subheading”). This will make it easy to map the InDesign styles to styles for the Kindle.
- Make sure the main portion of the text flows in proper sequence from text box to text box. It’s OK, however, to put each chapter in its own file (indd) and accumulate all those files into an InDesign book (indb) file (in fact, doing so will make it much, much easier to create an ePub if you later decide you want that, too).
- Whenever feasible, put the chapter titles, chapter numbers, chapter epigraphs, etc. in the body of each chapter’s text and apply appropriate styles to format and align them. Otherwise, the Kindle designer will have to spend time (read: cost you more money) to place each one of those individually.
- Whenever possible, use anchored graphics (anchored to the appropriate place in the text) instead of unanchored, placed graphics. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to keep track of where they go. (InDesign’s export to RTF or ePub will typically use a left-to-right then top-to-bottom methodology to decide where to put all the various text and graphics boxes).
- Don’t force hyphens to break words or force a new line in the middle of a paragraph. This almost always requires the Kindle designer to search for all hyphens and line breaks one-by-one and remove the extraneous ones.
- Don’t use multiple blank lines to add white space between paragraphs. Instead, use a paragraph style to increase the “space before” or “space after” setting.
There are other things you can do to make life easier for your Kindle designer but the above items will go a long way to saving time — and, thus, money — in the Kindle design process.
If you really want to keep the cost of Kindle conversion low, take the time to create a Word document of your book that:
- Uses Word’s defined styles (Heading1, Heading2, Heading3, etc.) for titles, headings, subheadings, etc.
- Uses only Word’s default font
- Uses no tabs or forced line breaks or mid-word hyphens
- Uses Word’s default bulleted and numbered lists features (don’t try to design your own or use fancy bullet or number characters)
- Leaves out the headers and footers (that includes page numbers)
Any fancy formatting and multiple fonts will be lost in the Kindle. If you also have a PDF of the book’s final design as sent to the printer, by all means send that along, too. We can see the fancy formatting used in the PDF and create appropriate format options for the Kindle edition (within the Kindle’s limited capabilities).
The more of the suggestions above that you can implement, the less expensive the Kindle conversion process will be.
9 Comments
November 13, 2009 at 7:37 am
Okay, check on all those but the first. I insert headers in sections – chapter by chapter – to avoid a header on a chapter’s first page. Yes, I could set that first page up as a separate master page, but I’m already juggling four, and I try to keep it simple for myself. I’m also using the last edition of PageMaker.
Yes, we could probably have a whole discussion on proper PageMaker formatting! I did have a former book designer walk me through the process, as the first month I thought I was gonna beat my head against a wall or something…
November 13, 2009 at 7:57 am
It’s been so long since I’ve used Pagemaker that I really can’t comment on it anymore. Our Kindle clients, so far, have used either Word (I shudder whenever I find out somebody typeset a book in Word) or InDesign (or their book designer used InDesign), so those are the two formats we deal with all the time.
The worst case is when the only format they have is a PDF (usually the PDF submitted to the printer for the print edition) and the book has lots of special formatting and graphics/photos.
Although we can create a Kindle (or ePub or most any other e-book format) from any source file, some take far more time to do. And time is money when you’re paying somebody to do it.
In InDesign, I typically have six to eight different master pages for a book, unless the book is only text with chapters but no parts/sections containing the chapters.
If you never intend to create a Kindle, ePub, etc, version of a book, most of the above is irrelevant. But you never know what you might want to do next year as the e-book market continues to evolve.
November 18, 2009 at 7:06 pm
[...] If you’re interested in the Kindle instead, check out these good suggestions for getting ID files ready for Kindle. [...]
November 19, 2009 at 2:52 pm
These suggestions are spot-on. We are teaching ourselves how to produce ePub files at the non-fiction publisher that I work for in order to keep the production of ebooks in-house to save $. We’ve found all of the above to be true based on our research. Hadn’t considered the ligature issue yet – thanks for the heads up.
Good idea about the Word doc – we hadn’t considered that but that would certainly simplify issues. Our problem is that our proofreader’s corrections are done in our InDesign files after the galleys are set (not in the original Word manuscript docs).
This print designer never would have thought that producing ePub books would be fun – but it’s really interesting work and if we can reach even more readers – then that’s the goal.
November 19, 2009 at 3:16 pm
We’ve found that, often, it is easier to produce a good Kindle format and then use that to convert to ePub.
I’m still toying with the idea of coding all our in-house book with XML to make ePub conversion easier (at least in theory). The biggest problem is cost of good tools for doing the XML coding. And, for maximum benefit, we need to update our InDesign from CS3 but now figure we’ll wait for CS5 next year.
The comments on providing an MS Word document was primarily aimed at the self-publishers and small indie publishers with whom we work through our Five Rainbows Services subsidiary.
Walt
November 25, 2009 at 12:01 pm
I am wondering if you have any tips about master page headers? I work for a small press and we produce our books using InDesign .indb files. I’ve gotten the ePub generation down pretty well now, except for the headers. We include a header at the top of each page of the print-book version that has the name of the book and the page number (done on the master page). However, after we convert to ePub, the title of the book drops off but the page numbers show up in the ePub document as a “floating” number along the right side of the screen. I’ve purchased eBooks for my Sony eReader and they manage to include a header with the book name at the top of each page, and no residual page number from the print version leftover, either.
Any tips you’d care to share?
Thanks!
November 25, 2009 at 2:58 pm
When exporting from ID to ePub, you need to add the necessary metadata to the file first by selecting “File Info…” on the File menu. I suspect that not all ereaders will use that data, but that’s where they will get it (Title, Author, etc.).
As for those page numbers in the margin, if they match the page numbers in the ID document then you probably have a “page-map.xml” file in the OEBPS folder within the ePub file itself that maps those page numbers. However, some readers (I don’t know for sure if that includes Sony) will generate a synthetic page map. I know Adobe Digital Editions does this. If you find that “page-map.xml” file in your ePub file, you could probably modify it by using empty name attributes (or maybe just deleting the list of page cross-refs), which should cause nothing to be placed in those locations. You can find out more about that file in the Adobe ePub Best Practices Guide.
February 5, 2010 at 2:07 pm
Thank you so much for this page, it has been very helpful in my experimentation with epublishing. However, I seem to still have one major problem with InDesign export that I’m hoping you might be able to help me with. (I apologize in advance for bothering you with this very fundamental question!) I thought it was a CS3/CS4 issue, however you stated above that you are still using CS3 which makes me hopeful. I do not have an option in my CS3 to export as .epub (file menu->export=pdf/eps/xml/svg/ind-exchage is all I have in my program)- how do you export as an epub file from indesign CS3?
February 5, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Actually, you do have that option. Try:
File
Cross-Media Export
XHTML/Digital Editions…
I can, however, almost guarantee that you won’t get a well-done ePub file from that process. You’ll have to dig into the ePub file and massage some of the XHTML files contained in it.
I also recommend you read my Creating ePub Documents from InDesign and check out the links I provide there.