Tips for creating e-books

E-book creation tips

Creating an e-book can be a rocky process, often with no preset path from the original document to the finished product. It's difficult to tell in advance what you might need to do, or not do, to make sure a given project renders correctly. However, before you begin the conversion process, there are ways to make things go more smoothly.

Start with the cleanest possible input document. There should be no stylization, formatting or elements present that you don't want in the final product. If something can't be supported in the destination format, it may well get stripped out automatically, but sometimes it might just be translated into something you don't want. You might have no choice but to clean up the original by hand, but it may well be possible to script the cleanup process, depending on what you're using to compose your originals.

Consider using HTML as an intermediate target format in all cases. Since the majority of e-book formats revolve around some variant of HTML, it might be a good idea to standardize on HTML as the format to export to first from whatever program you used to edit the document. This minimizes the amount of processing that has to be done by the e-book converter itself. What's more, if you need to perform any manual editing on the file to get it to process correctly, HTML is a convenient format to do that: You have direct access to the source code via nothing more than a plain-text editor.

Test the results on multiple devices. Get your hands on as many reading devices as possible -- or, failing that, get in touch with people who have a number of different reading devices and get feedback from them. The desktop Kindle application, for instance, has quirks that the actual device does not (e.g., how each handles non-Western characters), so it helps to know when problems like this are relevant.

Be prepared to repeat as necessary. You will almost certainly have to make multiple passes across an e-book to make sure everything translated correctly. Odds are it won't -- at least not the first time -- and you'll have to go back and tweak many different things by hand. In a way, this is another argument for using HTML as an intermediate format, because many of the tweaks that might need to be carried out could be partly automated. Keep notes of what breaks each time so you don't have to repeat your mistakes.