Much has been written in the past year about publishers responses to the Ebook revolution. Little has been written, in comparison, of the software developers behind the books. A case in point is Adobe. Anyone with a web or publishing background looking for a good software program to make digital books, would quite naturally take a look at Adobe.
Adobe, after all, makes Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and a few other useful programs for producing digital content. With both a web and publishing background myself, and normally quite a fan of Adobe products, they were my first choice when I decided to try making my first ebook using the epub file format. (Note: epub is the format used by Apple, Kobo, and most other ebook readers with the exception of Amazon’s Kindle.)
For epub’s, Adobe’s go-to product is InDesign CS5. “Create compelling eBooks in the EPUB format for the Apple iPad, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble nook, mobile phones, and other devices,” their website reads. For $699, it would seem like solid choice. InDesign has always been a great program for making multi-page documents, like magazines and books. I downloaded the free 30-day trial, with the intention of purchasing the product. Already familiar with InDesign, I figured the leap from pdf to epub should be a short hop, right?
Not exactly.
InDesign treats the ePub format like it was an after-thought. An “.indd” file (InDesign’s native format) must be completely reformatted before making an readable ePub book. Even then, it seems to be a crap shoot if the file is going to work or not. After three weeks working part-time for more than 40 hours on a small 120-page book, browsing forums, reading help files and support articles, I was never able to get my ebook into a format that was acceptable for upload to Apple, or was formatted properly on my Kobo eReader.
So I downloaded two shareware programs: Calibre and Sigil, both of which were referenced in just about every non-Adobe forum I browsed. I dumped a text document into Calibre, and converted it to an epub file. I then opened that file with Sigil, edited it, uploaded a graphic for the cover, created a table of contents and… completed the project in all of two hours.
Converting the epub into a Kindle-accessible format took an extra mouse click.
