Three Things Writers Need to Understand About Designing Ebooks
I like to think my blog is a safe place where we can meet as writers regardless of the publishing path we choose. For that reason, I try to bring you posts that will apply equally well to traditional, hybrid, and indie authors. While those of you heading down a traditional path might not think you need to know about designing ebooks, I disagree. Your name is on the product, and people will give you poor reviews if your traditionally published book is badly formatted. You might be able to avoid that fate if you can talk intelligently to your editor and agent about ebook formatting. And for indies, well, the importance is obvious.
I’m not an ebook designer, so I wanted to bring you a post by someone who was. I first learned about Paul Salvette at Lindsay Buroker’s excellent website and spent more hours that I want to admit to reading the resources he provides at BB eBooks. He knows his stuff. He’s going to talk to you about three important things to understand about designing ebooks, so that we can raise the standard–reflowability of content, HTML and CSS, and what tools to use to make our own ebooks.
So without further ado, take it away Paul…
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Designing EBooks Needs to Get Better
By Paul Salvette
Recently, I shelled out a whopping $12.99 for Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In at Amazon so I could learn more about the career options for my little girl. She’s only 20 months old, but you can never start thinking about this sort of thing too early. When I cracked open the eBook on my Kindle for iPad this is what I saw:
For some reason the publisher decided to use an image as a page for the title rather than proper text. Not only does this look tacky and hideous, but it does not scale well on smaller devices like smartphones. Also, on the right side you will notice there is a gigantic wad of whitespace in between each paragraph of front matter. For $12.99, you’d think the publisher would have spent a bit more time making everything look nice, especially the first two pages the reader sees after the purchase.
The Problem with eBooks
Most big publishers with a few notable exceptions still think of eBooks as lame replicas of print books. They spend very little time learning the varying technical requirements of each platform and just try to slap something on the market with very little quality control. A “Save As” button click from an InDesign or Word file intended for the print version always makes for a terrible eBook—but they try to get away with it. Time and time again, eBooks from major publishers have been pulled by major vendors like Amazon due to excessive reader complaints about the formatting.
Additionally, major publishers are much more concerned with Digital Rights Management (DRM) to lock down your eBook and other inconveniences rather than actually creating a nice-looking interior. Luckily, authors and small presses are much more attuned to the wishes of their readers, so they can adapt to the technology challenges that accompany the eBook format.
Reflowability of Content
To understand the difference between an eBook and a print book, we need to understand that eBooks are intended for all sorts of devices—from big PC monitors to tiny smartphones. Therefore, trying to typeset all the text into a fixed page size (like publishers have been doing for centuries) is a fool’s errand on eBooks. Have you ever tried to read a PDF with a tiny font on a smartphone? Not a pleasant reading experience.
Since eBooks need to be read on all sized devices and users need to have the ability to adjust the font, font-size, and orientation, it is important that eBooks are reflowable. This means that the content should properly break into as many lines as needed for any-sized viewport. Try adjusting the width of your browser on Marcy’s excellent blog to see what I’m talking about. So, an eBook that is 400 “pages” on an iPhone might be only 200 pages on the Amazon Kindle Fire HD.
Because word processing and desktop publishing software was designed for fixed-layout type documents that would be printed on a specified page size, it was necessary for eBooks to take a different approach. Luckily, there was a bunch of nerds already working on this technology since the internet was young and this was called…
What’s Inside an eBook?
HTML or HyperText Markup Language is what comprises the content of all your eBooks believe it or not. Don’t be scared if you haven’t heard the term, because you probably look at it every single day. HTML is also the standard that makes up the content on all websites. Without geeking out too much on the details, it is basically a series of rules to indicate how content should be “marked up.” When these rules are followed, web browsers (like Google Chrome) and eReading systems (like iBooks) know how to understand or “parse” the content to ensure that it renders as a good reading experience for the user.
For example, a paragraph of content in HTML gets special tags at the beginning and end of it, while a heading gets a different set of tags wrapped around it. You can also use HTML to display more complex content like tables, lists, and embedded images. What is also nice about HTML is it allows you to provide clickable links to other parts of the eBook or website. This is particularly useful for eBooks when constructing a functional Table of Contents or making your eBook more interactive. Below is an example of the classic poem Ozymandias marked up in HTML:
It will end up looking like this in the Kindle Fire:
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets compliments HTML and is a series of rules that provide presentational styling to your content. This is an important part of web design and an even more important part of eBooks. A typical novel will have around 1–2,000 lines of HTML code, and if you wanted to change something like the size of the indent on your paragraphs, it would be a heinous task to have to go through and change each line. Rather, you can use your style sheet to make one change that will apply to all the HTML. Below is an example of some CSS code telling any paragraphs with a class of “poemtop” to have a small indent and some whitespace above it, but none on the left, right, and bottom:
eBooks also contain additional files that dictate the linear order of the eBook, the metadata, and all the images, fonts, and multimedia contained in the eBook. This is all part of what is called the EPUB specification—an open-source eBook format that is used by all the major eBook platforms except Amazon. The MOBI/KF8 format is what is sold at Amazon, but it is very similar to EPUB with the exception that Amazon has proprietary control over the format rather than it being open source. If you have your eBook designed in the EPUB and MOBI/KF8 formats, you will be able to professionally publish at all eBook markets including Smashwords, iBooks, Nook, Kobo, and, of course, the biggest of them all: Amazon.
So How Do I Make my eBook?
Since eBooks are composed of HTML rather than a fixed-layout type program like Word, it is necessary to first get your eBook’s content into proper code. Calibre is an excellent eBook management system for readers, but it is not intended for publishers. Using Calibre for professional publishing purposes is discouraged, and Amazon will actually reject eBooks made in Calibre. Some indies try uploading a Word .docx to Amazon or the dreaded Smashwords Meatgrinder to automatically create an eBook—big mistake and readers will notice the ugly interior. Much like Word’s spell checker is a bad substitute for editing, automated HTML conversion is a bad substitute for eBook design.
If you do not wish to learn the technical mumbo jumbo behind eBooks, Sigil or Jutoh may be the best option to create your eBook. However, it is a good idea to at least have some knowledge of HTML, CSS, and the EPUB format as technology progresses and readers begin demanding more features in your eBooks.
If you would like to get your hands dirty and learn about creating the source files for your eBook, you’ll be glad to know that the software to do this is free. Notepad++ is an excellent text editor that can be used to create your HTML (Text Wrangler is a free option for Mac users). As HTML and CSS have been around for ages, there are excellent learning resources for these topics available for free at places like the Mozilla Foundation to help get you started.
I don’t want to turn this into a buy my book-type guest post, but I’ve got a book that can teach you from start to finish the ins and outs of eBooks called The eBook Design and Development Guide (available at Amazon), and we also have some eBook production tutorials on our website. Another alternative is contracting out the eBook conversion to a shop. 52 Novels and Rob Siders are excellent, and our own shop, BB eBooks, can get you a novel turned into an eBook for all major platforms for as low as $60. Whatever you do, don’t settle for a poorly designed eBook!
Have you run into ebooks that are poorly formatted? Does a poorly formatted ebook influence your decision about whether or not to buy a book?
About Paul:
Paul Salvette is the Managing Director of BB eBooks, a small business dedicated to eBook design and development in Bangkok, Thailand, founded in June 2012. His technical knowledge of eBooks somewhat surpasses his mediocre writing capabilities, so he decided to dabble in that aspect of the publishing process. He is the proud owner of a pair of sunglasses.
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Mar 20, 2013 @ 11:48:30
Great post! This is something I’m going to focus more on for my next publishing attempt. I just wanted to mention that Scrivener does a decent job at formatting as well, as long as you take the time to play with the compile settings. It’s not free, but it’s not expensive and since I compose there anyway it comes in very handy to have it able to do the different ebook formats on output. Also, InDesign is attempting to handle it as well but so far it hasn’t been pretty. I haven’t tried it with CS6 yet, but 5.5 was…not there. I suspect though that they’ll figure it out eventually. I hope. 🙂
Mar 20, 2013 @ 14:27:12
Hey, Paul –
Thanks so much for the explanation of how this works. For my first ebook, I was working with my agency’s e-stributor program, and the formatting was a nightmare to get right, especially since I had epigrammic quotes under my chapter headers that had to be centered and aligned just right. It finally all turned out okay, but I’ve decided to go solo on my second book.
I had heard about the benefits of Scrivener (which Melinda above also referenced) for writers, so I just bought it a few weeks ago and am starting to learn/use it now. One of the things I’d heard about Scrivener is that you can format an ebook with it. How does that work?
Thanks a lot!
~Kathy
Mar 20, 2013 @ 16:50:53
Great information! I’d heard bits and pieces of all this, but never all in one place. 🙂
Mar 20, 2013 @ 17:35:47
Wow – now I know even less than I thought I knew. There’s a lot of very good information here. It kind of scares me.
Patricia Rickrode
w/a Jansen Schmidt
Mar 20, 2013 @ 17:44:40
I’m pleased to say I have your book and was glad for the reminder to pull it out, as I’m getting ready to format my first, self-published novel. Scrivener does do the formatting and I have that as well. So we’ll see how it all rolls out at some point. Such good advice, though. I can’t tell you how annoyed I’ve been by the formatting of some digital books. JR Rowling was so slow to release Harry Potter in digital, but wow, they did a nice job on the formatting.
Mar 20, 2013 @ 18:33:00
I just did a presentation on this very topic at my RWA chapter meeting this past weekend. 🙂 While formatting an ebook is not hard, it’s not trivial, and not something you can knock out in an hour if you want a professional product. I use Sigil then convert the epub to mobi with Amazon’s Kindle Previewer. I’m a graphic designer and web developer so that helps. 🙂
Mar 20, 2013 @ 22:15:35
Jennette, you can tell by looking at your ebooks that you know what you’re doing. Hanger 18 is one of the prettiest ebooks I’ve seen, so much so that I mentioned it in my review of the book on Amazon and Goodreads.
Mar 20, 2013 @ 18:33:34
Fabulous information here. Thanks so much!
Mar 20, 2013 @ 21:14:19
I’m working on my first eBook, it’s a collection of short stories. I’m using Scrivener and have tested the formatting a few times by reading it on my Kindle and iPhone. It does take some tweaking but it seems to be working fine.
I didn’t realize that eBooks were html and css. That’s interesting.
Thanks,
Jim
Mar 20, 2013 @ 21:15:50
I love all this information especially, as Jami says, having it all in one spot. I’ve been under the impression that you could create your book in Scrivener and save it in a good e-book format. What I hear you saying is: that’s not true.
Evidently I’m going to have to do a ton more research….
Mar 20, 2013 @ 22:08:08
Jenny, I’m using Scrivener and yeah, you can do it. Just need to learn the right tweaks. I’ll let you know more, though, when I actually upload. But so far, I’ve been able to make my book look very pretty in both Kindle and epub. (I use the kindle previewer, so I don’t have to keep sending it to my kindle, but have also looked at it on the device. I took Gwen’s class, just finishing it up, and it has helped a lot.)
Mar 21, 2013 @ 21:59:03
Most of this was good until the part about how to create the ebook. If you accurately and carefully follow the Smashword Style Guide in MS Word, you can create a file that will upload to Smashwords and pass through their “dreaded meatgrinder” and yield a professionally formatted ebook. I have done it 8 times so far and not one rejection. I did have a horrible time trying to upload a .doc file to Amazon. That only works if you have not strayed from standard MS Word formatting style. However if you export that very same document as filtered html, you again get a professional result (very much so if you also go in and insert the hard page break code that otherwise gets skipped). This extends from a wide variety of paragraph and heading formats to the table of contents. I’ve used Sigil and it is much harder. I’ve done it and can create a good ebook in about 1-2 hours, but using the automated processes is much better and is 99% the same. What I have not tried yet is including graphics inside the ebook.
The secret of the epub format is that it is just a zip file with a specific internal structure. It is just as easy to use Sigil to look at the structure as it is to rename the file with a .zip extension and open it n Explorer. The only way to distribute with Smashwords to the other retailers is to pass your book through the meatgrinder. They now offer the ability to upload an ebook directly, but they will not currently distribute it. Amazon has links for a Mobi ebook creator ap that you can download so you can then upload a complete ebook. I have not tried it yet because of the ease and success I have had with uploading .html files. I’d recommend Sigil and the Mobi ebook creator if the automated processes don’t work for you. Sometime I like to comment how easy I found the Smashwords and Amazon formatting, but I have to remember I’ve had 20 years of desktop publishing experience which makes it seem easy. I also don’t use the real MS Word for even a single step of my process. I use a clone called TextMaker. Wonderful simple and small program. Cheap, too.
Mar 22, 2013 @ 03:09:30
HI
Well, I agree with most of this–but I don’t see a thing wrong with the design of that first book. Many seem to do that with the copyright page.
As for inside formatting–it’s a huge pet-peeve of mine. I try to make mine look good in any e-reader–but all I can test it on is my iPad and iPhone–which makes it look okay to me 🙂 That’s one complaint I’ve never had from a reader.
We code using html–it’s much ‘cleaner’ than using some of the masher programs out there. I’ve seen worse formatting in NY books, though–really horrid in some.
Great info–thanks for taking the time to write it.
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Mar 24, 2013 @ 14:47:23
Great article, Paul.
All I can add is emphasis that Word, Scrivener, InDesign and other document generating programs are not-quite-right for producing ebooks just because they are designed for producing DOCUMENTS. Ebooks are not documents. Such programs CAN be wrestled and wrangled into submission, but because they are over-powered for the task, there is always a risk of wayward code that will break an ebook.