Anybody own, use or write for Kindle?

I have some questions about the Kindle format and amazon is as hard to get straight answers out of as any other fascist monopoly. So... anybody here own or use a Kindle? Or wrote/produced/whatever material for it?

It's HTML files, right? But is each "book" a single file? Or is it a package so you can have multiple files and pictures and such?

Thanks

You might find these tips helpful:

http://kindleformatting.com/formatting.php

Thanks, shelagh. That's pretty helpful.

I notice they mention using mobipocket to pre-format. I have been trying to convert an HTML file to mobipocket with little luck.

It definitely drops table background graphics. Did you have any luck with images or linked Contents Tables?

The best way to use mobipocket creator is to upload a pdf file. The pictures will be stripped out but you can upload them and insert them into the file.

Use this code at the start of every chapter to insert a page break:

Code:

<p style="page-break-before: always">

e.g.

Code:

<p style="page-break-before: always">Chapter Heading</p>

Thanks again.

It doesn't seem to like tables very much.

No pictures, except for the cover. Each book is a separate file.

My husband uses a kindle and likes it. You have to be near a Sprint system to download books. It isn't possible to download books from all areas.

The old one will store 200 books and the new one 1500.

Carol

I didn't know the wifi download was limited. That is REALLY awful
Especially since, as I just found out, the new one has no slot to upload from memory card.

I'm not a fan. No one knows how many Kindles have been sold, nor how many people have downloaded Kindle ebooks. What we do know, however, is that more people have downloaded ebooks for their iPhone then any other eReader (Kindle, Sony reader, etc.). I think Amazon wasted a ton of money on this one... in another year the Kindle will be old news and the all-in-one device (such as the iPhone) will be what everyone uses.

I think this is post is going to end up like that comment Bill Gates made about "64k [of RAM] should be enough for anyone"!

Kindles have taken off, now outselling every other make - they have sorted out the connectivity, and the speed. And because it's Amazon, they are providing the massive volume of content - which is what people who love reading actually care about.

It's a great experience and can't be compared with reading on a tiny, shiny phone screen. The new Kindle 3 is actually much better than reading a book. And you can read as easily in bright sunlight as a darkened room.

The key feature is something that took much longer to develop than an LCD screen - the magnetic ink. It uses a fraction of the electricity of a phone. I can read all day for a week without access to electricity. My 3G works in Africa - so I not only have access to new books, I can also deal with my email or browse the web even if it's just for a googlemap.

Most importantly, as an author, I can now publish to Amazon and sell my work, bypassing the entire publising fraternity. I get paid directly. I set my prices, and create my marketing material.

Kindle is the future - not because of the technology but because they have returned the focus to the author, and rewarding the author instead of all the middlemen in the publishing fraternity. It's worth supporting them just for that alone. They are putting books and reading back on the "cool" list!

I don't work for Amazon :-)

I'm one of those now downloading to my phone for which I need to carry a battery around like the old cell phones - remember - the ones with the battery in a leather case and the phone on top, carried with a strap?

What I like about downloading to the phone, though, is using one piece of technology for everything and having it handy when I need it.

I'm hoping for an ipad; but I hear it has drawbacks, too. When will the perfect everything instrument be available at reasonable cost?

I think the ereaeders should be free, bundled with ebooks to encourage the purchase of the books. Once you have the ereader, you're hooked on buying more ebooks. Seems logical marketing to me.

As for my experience with Kindle. If you have a print book for sale on Amazon.com and have activated the "search inside" feature, transferring that book to Kindle is a walk in the partk.

If you have html files, that works pretty well, too. However, I ran into issues with the front pages and never did figure out how to put in an index. You can see my cobbled attempt by searching Kindle for Amour: Stories of Love and Friendship by D. K. Christi. I gave up on producing my own cover and purchased one from a cover person at what I thought was very reasonable.

Good luck.

Traditional indexes don't work on e-readers such as kindle. There are no page numbers. The reader can configure the page size and orientation, so the pages are different from reader to reader. Kindle includes a search function that is adequate for many of the ways you would use an index.

{D K Christi} I'm a web designer/developer and I believe that the index is done with anchors. They aren't difficult. I'll test it out on my own submission first, and let you know how and give you the coding to copy and paste at the beginning of each chapter and at the beginning.

Your cover is lovely, a professional cover is so important :-)

Something like an index can be done with html anchors. You would insert anchors at strategic locatinons in the manuscript and then build an index of links to the anchors. It is, however, a tedious and error-prone process for an index of any size at all. The kindle author's group generally agrees that given the Kindle's search feature, an index isn't worth the trouble. I think an index in a technical book can be a good thing, though (there are some things you can't search for), and have considered writing a program to make it easier.

A couple of years ago my son and I got a Kindle for my visually impaired granddaughter. At the time she was in high school and found it difficult to use. She gave it back so my husband could enjoy it, but reclaimed it after graduation and now uses it for the university and finds it very useful as she can change the font to a size suitable for her to read.

Carol

For those who would like to create links within their text for Kindle - either to a glossary, or to chapters, to to an "About the Author" (HTML format)

Let's assume you are making a Table of Contents.

1) At the top of EACH chapter (or the place you want the link to land) do the following

I cannot use the correct < or > signs or this code executes instead of displaying what to do - replace { with a < and replace } with a > after you paste this into your own HTML document.

{b}{a name="chapter2"}{/a}Chapter 2{/b}

This coding creates the wording "Chapter 2" in bold, and places an anchor point named "chapter2" at the beginning of the line. Unlike normal links you DO NOT put the words inside the {a} and {/a} tags.

The name must be unique, it can only be lowercase letters, it cannot contain spaces or punctuation and cannot START with a number.

2) At the beginning of the book, surround each chapter name with the following.

{a href="#chapter2"}Chapter 2{/a} - Introduction

{a href="#chapter3"}Chapter 3{/a} - Name of Chapter

{a href="#chapter4"}Chapter 4{/a} - Name of Chapter


etc.

This gives an underlined link Chapter 2, and a non-underlined portion that describes the chapter.

Formatting the Table of Content is another topic. This simply puts each chapter on a new line (
{br /} is an HTML carriage return) You could have them in a bullet list, or indented etc. I have seen a space saving table of contents that runs them like a menu with :: between numbers.

If you can, it does seem to work better to publish to Amazon (Kindle) as an HTML and not a Word document if you can manage it. My Word document was translated with poor formatting and spacing. The HTML version came out exactly as I intended.

Dianne

To see how this works, you can download a sample of Mr. Planemaker's Flying Machine for free. I added a contents page at the beginning that links to the first page of every chapter:

http://www.mobipocket.com/en/eBooks/eBookDetails.asp?BookID=78501

Thanks for the great info. I will go back to Amour and see what I can accomplish.