PE3 - eBooks

Well, it's been a long day. At first I copied and pasted text from my word document and kept trying to match the layout that my publisher did in my book. Since I am so new to InDesign, this was a bit over my head. So, I did some research and found out that there is a conversion tool that converts PDF's into InDesign files. So, I bought that. It adds the functionality from the InDesign Open function and add an Open PDF.















The PDF from my book's introduction was supposed to look like something like this:

















But, it was a pertty big mess when I opened the PDF into InDesign. The good news is that it kept the color, the header sizes, the images are all separate, so it was worth getting this conversion tool, but I have quite the mess to clean up.

I moved things around and I am slowly learning how funky publishing ePubs are and how finicky they can be about images and text flow etc. ePubs seem to be quite finicky. I've been reading Liz Castro's ePub on ePubs on my iPad.


















Unfortunately, most of the resources teaching how to do eBooks assumes that you know InDesign better than I do, which is making it harder. So, tomorrow, I am going to sit down with some Lynda videos and the class I purchased at CreativeLive.com and start learning InDesign better.

I did manage to export my Introduction to an ePub which was kind of exciting. You can view ePubs on the mac using Adobe Digital Editions which is free. This was great because I was afraid I would have to keep adding to my iTunes library and syncing to an iPad every time I wanted to see a new change. Adobe Digital Editions simulates what the book would look like on an iPad, and needless to say, my first one ain't pretty - Oh well, it's a start: