How to write and make an ebook for an Amazon Kindle?
Question:
Could you give me some suggestions as to where to start for ebook conversions? I have an Amazon Kindle.
Answer:
Take what you will from the below. This is what I’m going to soon do for myself (I’m working very hard to get a publishable book and ebook available for Dev Manny, and I intend to do much or all of the below as well.)
You definitely want the Calibre software – this is the ‘Babel Fish’ of ebooks – use it to convert a document into a format you can read on an ereader like the Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, Apple iPad and others. Use it to auto-gen a book cover title (which gives you a graphic you can easily modify to create your own custom title page, and add the various ebook metadata (author, genre, summary, etc).
I worked with this in pretty good level of detail when converting “The League of Scientists” into a .MOBI format so a reviewer could view it on her Kindle. And after a lot of experimentation, I found what worked best for me:
I wrote LoS with the free OpenOffice Writer word processor software. Calibre was NOT good at converting the LoS from Writer or even from Microsoft Word or a PDF. It would always take my (correctly-formatted) source and after conversion there would be weird line spacing, and pictures would appear paragraphs away from what they were supposed to be.
My final solution that worked well was to take my source (using Writer in my case), and then export it as an HTML document. Then I imported the HTML into Calibre and converted THAT into an ebook (a .MOBI, viewable on Kindles).
The final result was an almost perfect copy of my original document. I say “almost”, because I noticed a strange thing: Any time I had a paragraph end with a quote mark (like at the end of someone speaking), there would be an extra blank line immediately under it. Weird, but it wasn’t a big deal to me at the time. I expect the fix is to clean up my HTML source – there’s probably unnecessary code in there that needs to be removed for it to work.
(Since it’s easy to generate a PDF, I did try a lot with converting from PDF – both using the free Amazon Kindle “convert” email command and the equivalent function in Calibre, but no luck – I never got a good conversion from a source PDF.)
I also had to change Calibre options to get it to convert reliably. I remember I had to tell it to NOT strip out “unneeded” HTML source – it strips it out by default and in my case that messed up the formatting (all my text was one gigantic block with no spacing, or something equally unusable.)
To summarize: I got the best results when using Calibre to convert my doc from an HTML source, though a little manual source HTML tweaking may still be needed to get it 100% perfect, and the Calibre conversion settings need to be tweaked as well.
