Jennifer Adam
Knowing more about eBooks
There are many format for these electronic books like more than 90% of the ebooks can be found on Apple’s iOS devices like iPhones, iPads and iPod and popularly found on Amazon’s Kindle. So I will highlight on different kinds of is eBook formats.
➡ EPUB (Electronic Publication): This proprietary eBook platform is developed by International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) which is a free and open eBook. There are many features of this eBook platform including re-sizable and re-flowalbe content, Embedded data, CSS styling, inline vector and raster images.
➡ Kindle: This open Standard format is adopted by Amazon by which users can easily read, browse and download ebooks, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and various digital media. Amazon has released various versions for this platform including Main kindle line, Kindle DX, Kindle Fire and Kindle keyboard.
➡ PDF (Portable Document Format): This is an open standard file format which is basically a multi platform which is helpful in viewing a files as well as for printing and successful format running for various operating systems including Mac OS, windows and mobile platform like Android. This is a well efficient and reliable file format where more than one billion files are running successfully today. One can count this file format as extensible, searchable , more secure and accessible.
So these were a few ebooks file format. Now lets focus on “how to make your eBook the best”. If you want to select the best eBook format then make up your mind for the one which has got all the “killer features”. Most of the eBooks comes with black and white reading format and don’t handle the pictures well. So my first recommendation would be make your eBook a text based one.
Electronic Publication (EPUB) format was designed to deliver the best quality text and images. It can be used as a ZIP format also with changing its extension by “.epub” to “.zip” and by this EPUB file can become a zip file which can even be unzipped.
This unzipped file can be divided into three categories including XHTML documents, packaging files and container files. You can easily used online tool to create you own EPUB Books.
Planning to commence your first eBook
The best way to start with an eBook is to buy it. Many eBook providing services including Lulu and Smashwords are available in the market, which will provide you the format which will translate all your word documents into EPUB with an affordable cost. These service providers have the mutual association with Apple, Amazon and with other digital eBook stores there you can easily create your own digital eBook.
It will be helpful in selling your ebooks also. Say if you want to sell it to Amazon then you can convert your word file for free by sending it to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). And if you are interested in Apple’s Eco-system then you can submit there. There you can find easy and effective EPUB exporting option and many other features.
If you feel the above procedure quite simple and looking for something different and challenging then you can opt for coding your EPUB by hand. Epub is based on XHTML version and feel like going with it then there are two option by which EPUB coding is done.
Step-1 :- First you have to grab an EPUB for the Internet which doesn’t have Digital Rights Managements (DRM) in it. In this step you will change the extension of “.epub” with .zip and set unzip to it. Now you are free to write.
Step-2 :- Next is the straight forward EPUB Point where you have to go through the typical structure of the EPUB format. The epb.ncx is the table of content and is quite straightforward. The epb.opf file is a place where you can set title, ISBN, author etc. it is a meta data. Here you can have a look on the coding which will help you out.
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd”>
<html xml:lang=”en” xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<title>1 Sunday afternoon | back to back – Book 1 Sunday Afternoon</title>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”css/book.css” type=”text/css”/>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8″/><meta name=”EPB-UUID” content=”3B0A6B89-F890-4843-AA2A-01C27CE8D573″/>
</head>
<body>
<div style=”white-space:pre-wrap”>
<div>CHAPTER 1</div>
<div>Kim and Jacob were ready to move out for their trip on Sunday, but suddenly they found that their all of the cars windows were broken. They were excited and planned to go to their old house for tranquility and refreshment. But something was there that doesn’t want them to go there.</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
This is how you can also create your eBook with your own EPUB and convert it into kindle friendly.
Reasons to choose EPUB
➡ perfect for HTML 5 and CSS 2.1
➡ support for embedded audio, video and fonts along with scripts and triggers.
➡ Distinctive structural changes for location and file names.
So this is how you can create your own eBook with your own simple procedures.
