This Makes No Sense At All

 Last time I did this was Dec 2017. At the moment, memory of how to do it is pretty foggy, but luckily I have my earlier blog posts on this to refresh my memory so printing them out to review. (look for Kindle label in this blog to find).  This book is a little easier than the others - text and inline photos, a table of contents, but no index. Susan has promised it will be out in two and a half weeks, so will try to do that. My immediate issue is that I remember that I have to make some changes to the Indesign file before putting out the epub file that I will update for Kindle, but don't remember quite what they were. Pausing to read my prior posts, and to review Kindle code for Healing Miles . From my 2012 notes I saw that to get reliable chapter breaks, each chapter had to be a separate xhtml file. The default of Indesign is to put out one big xhtml file, but it will break on a style, so I need to be sure the current Indesign document (for Walk, Hike, Saunter ) has an appro...

Dec 2017 and I am putting Susan's new book, Healing Miles , out to Kindle. I assume things will have changed again in the Kindle world since the last book (in 2012), so I'm logging my steps for my benefit and maybe yours. First step was to copy the Indesign file that represented the final version sent to Createspace and Lightning Source (print on design companies). Indesign puts out a PDF file that would to to a conventional printer, or a POD company such as CS or LS. Indesign also can put out an epub file that is the raw material for the Kindle version of a book. I work with a new copy of the ID file, as some tweaks are made for Kindle. One is that some Kindles, and certainly most Kindle Readers read color, so all the black and white images and illustrations in the book have to be replaced by color versions. I'm setting the book up as text reflowable. This was the only method on the 1st kindles. Now you can do fixed format, comics, etc. But for a mostly text based book...

We just cancelled our Sept. flight to Northern Spain a week or so ago (Norte route). First time in some twenty years that we have not done a major hike or backpack of some sort, and first time in 10 years that we have not been walking a Camino route. Susan has intense leg pain if she walks any uphill distance at all beyond about 10 minutes - according to her doctor, just something that needs rest, but we are more than three months into it at this point. Susan has blogged about it: backpack45.blogspot.com/2014/08/where-does-one-find-answers-vagaries-of-life backpack45.blogspot.com/2014/09/in-fog , but this post is mostly about I am doing instead.  The positive thing about this is that I have days, weeks, months suddenly available. Those never ending house chores sitting on the to do list are suddenly being accomplished. The back fence is repaired. Formerly on the edge of a down slope, it now sits on a three foot wide deck, farther away from the house than it once was, and with a ...

About a two years ago I posted on the process of putting our first two books on Kindle - converting-our-books-to-kindle-work-in.html . That involved getting a text file from the original page making software (Pagemaker and Indesign), and putting that text into a Word file just to get Word's ability to put out an html file. Getting the initial text was messy as I had the original Indesign CS. The easiest way to get text out of it was open it in Story Editor and cut and paste that text into Word. Then I would save as filtered web page to get html. The resulting html was run into Mobipocket Creator, and the file out of Mobipocket Creator was one I could load directly onto my Kindle, and when satisfied, send to Amazon. Once the initial html file was created, I never went back to Word. Corrections were made by editing the html file with Notepad++. Mobipocket Creator also built the initial versions of the toc.ncx file and the contents.opf file. The toc file creates the little tab bar a...

This is an as it happens log of my efforts to convert our print book We're in the Mountains, Not Over the Hill  to Kindle. In the process I hope to clarify my own thinking about how to do this. The book has about 20 b&w photos and a lot of carefully crafted layout. Several fonts, use of bold, italics, multiple paragraph formats, all to make the book look well done to the reader. The intent is to have the layout help communicate the book's message. Our print version was created with Pagemaker and resulted in a pdf file which was sent to the printer. The book sized Kindles require an Amazon proprietary format which is a subset of html. You can give Amazon a Word, PDF or HTML file, and they will automatically convert it to their format (free). You have the most control over the resulting appearance if you give them html, the least control if you give them a pdf. There are Kindle readers on all sorts of devices: IPhones, IPads, etc. Kindle is b&w and only a couple...