Send to Kindle
October 5th 2010 07:27
Desktop publishing took another step forward today with the release of Amazon's Kindle for Adobe InDesign. When you download the programme you should be able to take your print-ready book and turn it into a Kindle book with a few easy flicks of the keyboard.
The following are all possible:
* Maintaining font styling information, text alignment, paragraph alignment
* Exporting images present in the book into the Kindle book
* Adding a cover page, links within the book, bullets, numbering
* Specifying the Table of Contents to use for the Kindle book
* Exporting tables
* Using the "Kindle Previewer," already available as a free download to preview the content you have created.
Sounds pretty good, huh? Sounds also as if it might be in the beta stage - the very first comment on the site notes that the tool is great but... images are displaced - pagebreaks don't work. That's kinda disheartening.
When working properly, the conversion from book format to Kindle is only supposed to take a few minutes. What Amazon doesn't mention, of course, because it's not their business, is that getting a book to print ready stage on Adobe InDesign is a huge undertaking.
When I first came into my present job, my boss wanted me to learn Adobe InDesign. I even went out and bought a copy of the manual. I also nearly went crazy. InDesign demands a technical skill level not only in terms of computing skills but in terms of having an eye for what looks good on a page.
Furthermore, even though I had a video included in the book, and even though the book was phenomenally detailed in letting you know everything that needed to be done, I never really got to grips with the thing. There was just too much information. I needed the baby version obviously; one that would produce some good-looking results without me going manic in the interim.
The end result was that we went back to Publisher for our leaflets and fancier documents. It may be limited in scope, but man, it's a lot easier to use!
The following are all possible:
* Maintaining font styling information, text alignment, paragraph alignment
* Exporting images present in the book into the Kindle book
* Adding a cover page, links within the book, bullets, numbering
* Specifying the Table of Contents to use for the Kindle book
* Exporting tables
* Using the "Kindle Previewer," already available as a free download to preview the content you have created.
Sounds pretty good, huh? Sounds also as if it might be in the beta stage - the very first comment on the site notes that the tool is great but... images are displaced - pagebreaks don't work. That's kinda disheartening.
When working properly, the conversion from book format to Kindle is only supposed to take a few minutes. What Amazon doesn't mention, of course, because it's not their business, is that getting a book to print ready stage on Adobe InDesign is a huge undertaking.
When I first came into my present job, my boss wanted me to learn Adobe InDesign. I even went out and bought a copy of the manual. I also nearly went crazy. InDesign demands a technical skill level not only in terms of computing skills but in terms of having an eye for what looks good on a page.
Furthermore, even though I had a video included in the book, and even though the book was phenomenally detailed in letting you know everything that needed to be done, I never really got to grips with the thing. There was just too much information. I needed the baby version obviously; one that would produce some good-looking results without me going manic in the interim.
The end result was that we went back to Publisher for our leaflets and fancier documents. It may be limited in scope, but man, it's a lot easier to use!
| 85 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
