But how do you get your own InDesign-created ePub into an iPhone? You use the free Stanza Desktop application for the Mac or PC, available from Stanza’s creator, Lexcycle.
In Stanza for the iPhone/iPod Touch, you can use the Online Catalog feature to download free and paid eBooks from a variety of sources. My favorite way of reading ePubs on my iPhone is to use the free Stanza application. Most of these readers can read ePub files directly. This is potentially a huge market because Apple recently announced that there are now 30 million iPhones and 20 million iPod Touches. There are several free eBook readers available from Apple’s App Store (Stanza, Kindle for the iPhone, B&N eReader, and others). A competitor is Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch. If you’re using InDesign CS3, only Character Styles, Paragraph Styles, and Object Styles are preserved during the export.Īnother Approach: Creating ePubs for the iPhoneīut the Kindle is not the only way of viewing eBooks. Local formatting export is supported in the latest version of InDesign CS4 (v. If your InDesign document contains local formatting (a manually bolded word without a Character Style applied to it, for example), make sure you select the Local Formatting option under Base for CSS Styles in the Digital Editions Export Options dialog. This document also has helpful tips for formatting the InDesign file like this one: The steps for the conversion are detailed in the white paper. Calibre is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. To do the conversion, you need to use Calibre, which is a free, open source eBook conversion tool. This process, and how you can preview your eBook and upload it to the Amazon store are covered in a new white paper from Adobe just published this week. You need to convert your ePub file into the MOBI format, which the Amazon Kindle can read. However, it doesn’t read the ePub format. The eBook reader you’ve probably heard the most about is the Amazon Kindle. New White Paper Covers Conversion to Kindle You can use it to read and organize your eBook collection, as well as preview the ePub files you export from InDesign.
a free, lightweight eBook reading application for PC and Mac. You can preview the ePub you create in Adobe Digital Editions. Another posting details some of the improvements in CS4. Local formatting like bold will really come through as bold. Quite a few bugs are fixed, and you have new capabilities like being able to include images as anchored objects. InDesign CS4 will work much better than InDesign CS3. A highly useful blog post from Adobe called “Producing ePub documents from InDesign” provides some guidelines for preparing files correctly. Long InDesign documents need to be broken into separate files, and text frames need to be threaded together into one flow. However, not every InDesign file will work equally well. There are three panels of choices.īasically, the InDesign file is being converted to XHTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
You can create an ePub file by choosing File > Export for Digital Editions (CS4) or File > Cross-media Export > XHTML / Digital Editions (CS3). Not the final product, but a necessary step.” Think of epub as the eBook version of a press-ready PDF. epub is generally thought of as an intermediary format between the authoring/composition tool and the eBook itself. As Mike Rankin wrote on in February, ePub is “an open standard XML-based file format that allows text to reflow and adjust to the size of various screens. The first step is to create an ePub file. Below, I’ll point out an alternative method of reading your InDesign-created eBook. But a new Adobe white paper published this week, along with a couple of helpful blog posts from Adobe, will help you get started exploring this new technology.
However, the methodology for doing this isn’t necessarily easy or obvious. Great news for InDesign users is that Adobe InDesign provides one of the best ways to create e-Books (you need InDesign CS3 or InDesign CS4). When “The Lost Symbol,” Dan Brown’s followup to “The Da Vinci Code” was published this week, aside from preorders, the Kindle edition of the book outsold the hardcover edition at, one report said.
They’re just about the only part of the book industry that’s growing.