There is a question that would never have been asked just a few years ago. A few years ago, e-books were sold through their own website. And the market was not that big.
But that market no longer exists. Instead, there is a market that is one of the fastest growing industries. A market where the main resellers clamor for the product. A situation that books have never enjoyed!
As a result, many small publishers and unpublished authors are dusting off their pile of books and transcribing them into an e-book format to send to major bookstores. And you can too!
But then the question is “How to transcribe your book to an e-book format?”
First of all, you need to realize that eBook readers use multiple formats. Each of the resellers would like their books shipped in their own format, if possible. Therefore, he must determine to which formats he is going to transcribe.
Most manufacturers have opted for one or another of the above electronic publishing formats. The Apple iPad currently uses the MOBI format. The Kindle, on the other hand, uses the ePub format. Most of the others prefer the ePub format. Of course, the actual formats that each accepts will vary over time.
Unfortunately, Word and PDF are not common, or preferable as source documents.
That’s the bad new.
The good news is that each of the manufacturers will translate various formats to their preferred format. That means you can use plain text or HTML as common formatting.
Which is a lifesaver for the author with a manuscript in Word format that he wants to transcribe.
Currently, most word processors (for example, MS Word, OpenOffice Writer, and WordPerfect) provide some form of HTML. Unfortunately, most of them also provide a weird form of HTML with special non-standard codes to cover their own weirdness.
This is made worse by the fact that the HTML supported by eBook makers is actually a subset of HTML.
To overcome this, the technique I’ve found most helpful when transcribing books to eBooks is to remove all formatting and page titles (footers/headers) from a temporary copy of the book. This book is then saved as a text file which removes all codes.
I can then retrieve the text file in an HTML editor like Frontpage, Expression, Dreamweaver, or one of the countless free variations. Using copy and paste gives me the control I need over the file. This allows me to mark the text file correctly without worrying about bogus codes.
