Contents | Start | End | Previous: Chapter 25: Troubleshooting Your Book | Next: Chapter 27: Marketing Your Book
In the Introduction, we looked briefly at the ebook formats that Jutoh supports (either directly, such as Epub, or indirectly, such as PDF). In this chapter, we’ll go into more detail about these formats, and also describe the major distribution platforms that you may wish to use for selling your ebooks.
Epub is a free and open standard for reflowable ebooks, maintained by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). The most popular version of the standard is version 2, as used by all current Epub-based reader hardware and software, and a specification of version 3 is now available but implementations are not widely used in the real world. Version 3 adds more flexibility for absolute positioning, addition of sound and video, and web-like custom features using JavaScript. Jutoh currently targets Epub version 2 and a subset of version 3 features.
An Epub file is basically a zip archive containing HTML content, metadata describing the book, and a navigation map describing the structure of the book. An Epub can be encrypted, but this depends on cooperation between a particular platform (such as Apple Books) and the corresponding reader software. When you submit an ebook generated by Jutoh to an established publishing platform, the platform will deal with encryption issues.
Note that even though Epub is a standard, there are always quirks in the way ebook reader software and hardware implement the standard. Jutoh tries to smooth over these differences; for example, Jutoh’s Apple Books optimization feature fixes problems with Apple Books failing to honour centre alignment and image sizing.
Mobipocket is a format purchased by Amazon to be used by Amazon’s Kindle hardware and software; now Amazon are the odd man out in being the only ebook player using a non-Epub format. However, Mobipocket is based on Epub and Amazon’s Kindlegen application (formerly Mobigen) takes a set of Epub-like files (including the OPF file) as input to generate Mobipocket as output.
The older variant of Mobipocket is called KF7, and the newer, more capable variant is called KF8. KF8 can handle fixed layout books and richer formatting. Most older Kindle devices can be upgraded to use KF8, but certain early devices are restricted to KF7. Jutoh generates HTML that is optimized for both KF7 and KF8, and then calls Kindlegen to create the Mobipocket file.
Mobipocket files have the .prc or .mobi extension.
We will talk more about the Kindle platform later in the chapter.
PDF is a popular format for complex, fixed-layout documents, but is not ideal for devices with small screens and the ability to choose text size, which requires the ability to reflow the document. Jutoh can create OpenDocument Text (ODT) files which can then be turned into PDF, for example using the File | Export as PDF command in OpenOffice Writer or LibreOffice Writer. You can view the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader or Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). On Windows, you can force the document to be viewed in ADE by using Open With... in Windows Explorer’s context menu, or you can drag the document to ADE.
When displayed in Adobe Digital Editions, a PDF containing bookmarks will show a table of contents in the left-hand pane. Jutoh will generate styles with the required outline information if they are specified in the named styles, and then OpenOffice Writer or LibreOffice Writer will be able to save the bookmarks for the headings in the document. For this to work, you will need to make sure that ‘Heading 1’ has its outline set to 1, ‘Heading 2’ has an outline of 2, and so on. (And of course you will need to be using these styles in your project!) The outline setting can be found on the Indents & Spacing tab of the Jutoh style editor dialog. You can switch off outline output using the Use outline levels configuration property, for example if your document doesn’t use heading styles consistently and it would create a poor table of contents in Adobe Digital Editions. If your Jutoh styles don’t have outlines, you can achieve the same effect by using the Tools | Outline Numbering command in Open/LibreOffice to set numbering for your heading styles.
Jutoh outputs appropriate metadata to ODT files so that when you export to PDF, the title and author will appear in the left-hand pane in Adobe Digital Editions. If your cover design is on the first page of your ODT file, it will be used for the thumbnail in Adobe Digital Editions.
See also the next topic for creating headers and footers and a hyperlinked table of contents with page numbers for your PDF file.
OpenDocument Text is a word processor format that can be converted to many other formats such as Word and PDF, using for example the free OpenOffice suite, or LibreOffice which is an offshoot of the OpenOffice project. Note that Word itself tends to create more compact .doc files than does OpenOffice or LibreOffice, so you might want to re-save the file using Word if file size is an issue.
Before creating an ODT file, you might like to change the Paper size and margins in your configuration. You can also use the Mirror margins setting if you are creating a printed book, for example via Amazon’s CreateSpace service.
In addition to document-wide paper size and margins, Jutoh lets you adjust page styles for each section in your book, adding headers and footers with page numbers if necessary. If you have an advanced table of contents in your project, this will be converted to an ODT table of contents field with both hyperlinks and page numbers. For more information, please see the topic Creating OpenDocument files for print and PDF in the built-in help, under Jutoh User Guide.
If you wish to add headers, footers and page numbers manually to an ODT file generated by Jutoh, instead of using Jutoh’s page styles, follow these steps in LibreOffice (OpenOffice doesn’t currently support the Format | Title Page command):
Open the file in LibreOffice Writer.
Mark the title page using Format | Title Page; enter 2 into Number of title pages (to skip the cover and title page) and choose Convert existing pages to title pages. Check Reset Page Numbering after title pages. Press OK.
Choose Format | Choose Footer | Default. Click on the first available footer and choose Insert | Fields | Page Number.
Select the page number field and centre it.
You can also add a header if you wish, perhaps containing the title of the book.
To manually add a table of contents with page numbers and not just links, follow these steps in OpenOffice Writer or LibreOffice Writer:
Delete the Jutoh-generated table of contents.
Click on Format | Indexes and Tables | Indexes and Tables to show the Insert Index/Table dialog.
We need to associate heading styles used in the document with levels in the table of contents, similar to how Jutoh works when searching for headings to put in the table of contents. Check Additional Styles, and click the ‘...’ button. Assuming you are using ‘Heading 1’, ‘Heading 2’ and so on for headings in your document, click on each of these in the list and click on the >> button to position each at the appropriate point in the table: ‘Heading 1’ at position 1, ‘Heading 2’ at position 2, and so on. Press OK but don’t dismiss the Insert Index/Table dialog yet.
Now we need to make the entries hyperlinked. Click on the Entries tab and in the Structure area, click in the box just before the E# button, then click Hyperlink. Click in the box just after the E and click on Hyperlink. This creates LS and LE marks (Link Start and Link End). Click All to apply this to all entries, and then click OK to dismiss the dialog.
Right-click over the special ‘Table of Contents’ field that has been inserted in the document and choose Update Index/Table and you should find that a table of contents with page numbers appears.
All this will be done automatically if you already have a table of contents in your project marked with the ‘toc’ guide type.
Jutoh can output audio books in the form of MP3 files, using the operating system’s built-in text-to-speech engine or one of several other engines such as eSpeak. Obviously this is not going to be as good as a human reading the book, but it can be helpful in some circumstances, such as listening to a book when commuting. Also note that when using some voices, the generated MP3 files can’t be distributed commercially without permission from the original voice license-holder.
Creation of MP3 files requires an MP3 encoder; Jutoh uses the LAME encoder, as described in Appendix A: Installing Jutoh.
Kindle books account for the majority of all ebooks sold, so it’s obviously important to be in the Kindle store. Fortunately, Amazon makes this very easy for the independent author or small publisher using their publishing tools, in the USA and UK (check for support in other countries). You can upload your Jutoh-generated Mobipocket file, and Amazon will encrypt it for you if you wish. One of the great things about supporting the Kindle platform is that your books can be read on most smartphones, tablets, PCs, and Macs as well as on Amazon’s Kindle hardware.
To generate a Mobipocket file, choose the Mobipocket configuration in the Jutoh Control Panel, and click Compile. A file with the extension .mobi will be generated: this contains the KF8 format file that you can preview and sent to Amazon.
The first time you do this, you will be prompted to download the Amazon Kindlegen application, needed for the final conversion to .mobi. Jutoh can download and configure it automatically, or you can get it from here and configure the Kindlegen application in Preferences/Helpers. You can also get Jutoh to install Kindlegen if you click on Help Me Install Kindlegen in the Preferences/Helpers page, or in the Setup Wizard.
Note: when running Jutoh on the Raspberry Pi, Kindlegen is not available, so you need to install Calibre to create .mobi files. Or, you can create Mobipocket-optimized Epub files and submit these to Amazon KDP.
To create files suitable for processing by Kindlegen, Jutoh generates HTML, CSS and other files that are nearly identical to the ones used for Epub creation. However, the original Mobipocket format (KF7) is not quite as flexible as Epub and there are restrictions as well as features and behaviours unique to Kindle.
Jutoh optimizes code so the book will look as good as possible on both older KF7 devices and newer devices supporting KF8. Where generated CSS code is different for each platform, Jutoh uses ‘media queries’ so the appropriate code is used on each platform. Jutoh may perform other tweaks in future releases. For more details, please type KB0290 into the Jutoh help search facility.
Although Jutoh takes care of most of the low-level Mobipocket/Kindle technical details, you may also wish to read Amazon’s guidelines for advice on presentation, image size, and so on:
s3.amazonaws.com/kindlegen/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf
It is possible to upload Epub files to Amazon instead of converting to Mobipocket first, but if you do, you may miss out on Jutoh’s Mobipocket optimizations, giving poor results on some devices. Also, it’s better to preview the Mobipocket file on your machine than to rely on Amazon’s conversion before previewing with ‘Look Inside’.
By default, the Kindle reader will choose a suitable page to associate with the Beginning menu item or button in the reader. However you can change this by changing the document guide type to ‘text’. To do this, right-click on a document in the project outline to show the Book Section Properties dialog. Select ‘text’ from the Guide type dropdown list. You can also use the keyword %STARTPAGE%, in which case Jutoh will substitute the value of the property Start page guide type in the current configuration. This allows you to use a start page appropriate to the target device depending on configuration. Press OK and compile the book again.
Although the Amazon Publishing Guidelines describe how to embed audio and video, it seems that they will currently not accept books containing multimedia and any existing books containing audio or video were submitted during an experimental beta phase. Locally downloaded Kindle books will have their multimedia blocked. This may change in future.
At the time of writing, JavaScript is not supported in Kindle books submitted via KDP.
When submitting a .mobi file to Amazon KDP, you are also required to submit a high-resolution version of your cover separately; so strictly speaking, you don’t need a cover in your .mobi file. You can set the Cover design configuration setting to ‘(none’). However when previewing it’s nice to see a cover and there is no harm in leaving a low-resolution cover in your .mobi file when you upload it.
You may be surprised that Kindle books don’t open on the cover. This is an Amazon decision and it’s not possible to force books to do this.
For automated checking, you can check the Generate Epub option in your Mobipocket configuration so that Check can work on the Epub equivalent of the Mobipocket file (the formats share files and most formatting). Some Mobipocket-specific HTML will be included in this Epub so you may need to ignore a few of the errors, in particular those flagging up incorrectly positioned ‘a’ tags (bookmarks). If you are also generate Epub files, be sure to change the name of your file using the Book file name option in your ‘Mobipocket’ configuration, otherwise you will overwrite the file generated by the ‘Epub’ configuration, which will have different optimizations.
We recommend that you review your Kindle book in both Kindle for PC/Mac and Kindle Previewer. Kindle Previewer lets you set the current simulated device style, such as tablet, phone or e-reader. Although Kindle Previewer doesn’t specifically emulate Kindle for specific devices such as iOS and Android, Amazon now recommends that you use Previewer rather than actual devices for testing. See KB0118 in Jutoh help (‘How can I test my Epub and Kindle books?’) for more details.
Apple’s Epub-based Apple Books platform is administered through iTunes. Unfortunately, only the USA is supported at the time of writing, unless you are already set up to do business in the USA. Fortunately, you can use Smashwords and other aggregators to target iTunes, from any country. If you’re creating fixed layout books, first check that these will be accepted by an aggregator – quite often they’re not.
Epub files for Apple Books need a little tweaking to perform well on iOS. Edit your Epub configuration(s) and check the Optimize for iBooks property. Jutoh will then apply a few small changes the next time the book is generated. These are:
Font names are removed from styles (unless Generate font names is enabled).
Dummy span tags are added to centred paragraphs, since otherwise the centering is lost in full justification mode.
An image that is on its own in a paragraph, and has its size dimensions specified in its properties, is generated using a div that takes the dimensions of the image, and dimensions are removed from the image itself. This is because Apple Books ignores width and height specifications in images, and using a parent div is a widely used workaround.
If either Generate font names or Embed fonts is enabled, at the same time as Optimize for iBooks, Jutoh will generate a file called com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml with specified-fonts set to true. This will tell Apple Books to respect the fonts that are specified in the book; otherwise Apple Books will choose standard fonts.
Please note that if the configuration option Exclude cover from reading order is checked, the cover image does not appear in the actual Apple Books reader, only in the Apple Books bookshelf.
Here are some of the recommendations Apple gives for creating Epub files for Apple Books.
Use guide types such as ‘toc’, ‘title-page’, ‘preface’, ‘other.back-cover’ and so on – use the Book Section Properties dialog, available by right-clicking on a document in the project outline and choosing Properties, or by using the Document | Document Properties, Shift+Alt+Enter, or Alt+Click.
The first page displayed will be determined from the guide type in this order of preference: text, acknowledgements, dedication, epigraph, foreword, preface, other.intro. Override this with the other.reader-start-page guide type. You can also use the keyword %STARTPAGE%, in which case Jutoh will substitute the value of the property Start page guide type in the current configuration. This allows you to use a start page appropriate to the target device depending on configuration.
For cover art, use TIF, JPEG, or PNG image using RGB colours and at least 600 pixels on the larger axis. So at least, say, 400x600. Don’t include pricing or a reference to the physical edition on the cover.
Limit embedded images to 2 million pixels, and don’t use text in images if at all possible.
For further information, see the file iBookstoreAssetGuide.pdf available if you have an iTunes Connect account.
Barnes & Noble uses the Epub format for their range of Nook devices and apps; you can get your books on their site via Smashwords, or directly from their ‘PubIt!’ publication site at pubit.barnesandnoble.com. The PubIt! site contains formatting and submission guidelines. Nook readers are popular in the USA and came to the UK in late 2012. These are some of the guidelines mentioned on the PubIt! site:
The page margins should be set at 30 pixels on the top and sides, with 20 pixels on the bottom. In Jutoh, these can be set in your configuration (for example, HTML left margin).
Embedded fonts are allowed, but discouraged due to the extra size and licensing issues.
A Title Page is mandatory.
The Copyright page should show the ebook ISBN.
Cover image sizes range between 500x600 to 600x730.
When generating for Nook, switch off Generate iBooks XML in your Epub configuration or the file may be rejected.
The Nook doesn’t honour the ‘text’ guide type and so it is not possible to specify the first page when the reader first opens the book.
Your ebook cover – when viewed inside the book – will have margins around it; this is due to the fact that the Nook controls the margins (although you switch between several sizes in the Nook settings).
The Barnes & Noble ‘Nook Kids’ fixed layout format is very non-standard, requires a non-disclosure agreement from Barnes & Noble, and is unlikely to be supported by Jutoh; but regular reflowable Epubs are fine on the Nook.
To test your files using the Nook Android app, use a file manager app to copy the Epub file to the Nook/My Documents folder on the memory card. The book will then appear when you next run the Nook app. On the PC version of Nook, go to My Stuff and then Add Item, and add your book.
Kobo uses the Epub format; again, you can get your books on their site via Smashwords, or directly via the Kobo Writing Life site. Kobo has free apps for most smartphones, tablets and desktop operating systems, and sells its own ebook readers.
At the time of writing there are no known issues with Kobo’s Epub implementation that require special consideration. Conveniently, Kobo uses the same fixed layout Epub file format as used by Apple Books.
When generating for Nook, switch off Generate iBooks XML in your Epub configuration or the file may be rejected. It’s not clear whether the XML file can be included in Apple Books-compatible fixed layout Kobo books.
It’s difficult to test ebooks with the desktop Kobo reader applications (on Mac or PC) since they don’t accept arbitrary files on your hard disk. However, the Android Kobo application has an option for importing local content, so once you have the file on your Android device (for example using file transfer, Dropbox, web site, or email), you can then view it using Kobo.
Diesel uses a variety of formats, including Mobipocket and Epub; you can get your books on their site via Smashwords. At the time of writing there are no known issues with Diesel’s Epub implementation that require special consideration.
Lulu uses the Epub format and combines the advantages of print-on-demand with ebook publishing. There are a couple of considerations that we are currently aware of:
You need to have more than one chapter in the book, or Lulu will complain about the table of contents.
You should switch off Optimize for iBooks or Generate iBooks XML so that Lulu doesn’t complain about ‘unmanifested files’ – in Apple Books mode, Jutoh adds the file com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml in the folder META-INF inside the Epub. So try clearing this setting in your configuration, to remove this file. Also check that iTunesMetadata.plist hasn’t been added by iTunes – if so, compile the file again.
The author metadata needs to be output to Epub with opf:role set to ‘aut’, and the date metadata needs to have opf:event set to ‘publication’, or Lulu will complain. This is done automatically if they are not already set, but you can adjust these values using the ‘...’ buttons next to each item of metadata.
Smashwords is very popular with authors, especially as it has distribution deals with other major ebook platforms in addition to selling them directly from the Smashwords site in multiple formats. So if you want to be listed on sites that you can’t upload to on your own, and/or want to save yourself the hassle of submitting to multiple sites, this is great.
You submit a file in Microsoft Word format, so you need to do that extra conversion step in OpenOffice Writer or Microsoft Word after generating an OpenDocument file destined for Smashwords. Note that Microsoft Word creates a more compact file.
Smashwords will take your Word file and pass it through their ‘Meatgrinder’ program to convert it into the various formats supported by Smashwords (Epub, Mobipocket, HTML, PDF and more). The conversion is pretty good most of the time, but you may find that the output is not quite as good as if you generated the file directly using a program such as Jutoh.
When you create a Jutoh project, a ‘Smashwords OpenDocument’ configuration is added in addition to ‘OpenDocument’. The only difference between these is that the Smashwords variant has the Special index formatting and Special footnote formatting properties disabled, since Meatgrinder doesn’t like the special formatting associated with these options. So instead of using special fields, Jutoh will generate the index and footnote text in full.
There are two methods for helping Meatgrinder create a NavMap from the word processor document:
Create a linked table of contents page, which Jutoh will do automatically, or you can build your own. Don’t use Word or OpenOffice’s automatic table of contents generation facility since Meatgrinder doesn’t like field codes.
Start each section with the word ‘Chapter’.
Please see the Smashwords Style Guide at www.smashwords.com; Jutoh will help you conform to them but some aspects you will have to take care of yourself, such as careful use of text size, sparing use of empty space and consistent heading style usage. Much of what the Smashwords Style Guide says can be used when working with Jutoh, such as advice on use of indentation, paragraph spacing, images, and so on.
Recently, Smashwords has started allowing authors to upload Epub files. However, this is only used for delivery of the Epub format and you still need to upload Word files for the other formats.
See also Chapter 25: Troubleshooting Your Book for tips on dealing with Smashwords submission problems.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop you uploading Jutoh-generated files to your own web site using an FTP client such as FileZilla. If you’re making them available for free, there’s not much else to do except upload the files in different formats and add links to your web site. Or, you could simply link to the files on other platforms such as the Kindle store or Smashwords.
If you want to make your books commercially available, you could use a service such as www.e-junkie.com, which will serve files up to your users after payment. The files won’t be encrypted, but you can add a paragraph to the title page to request that people do not redistribute the file; this should discourage some piracy. A little bit of piracy may actually be a good thing in spreading the word about your books, and in my opinion, there will always be a majority of law-abiding citizens prepared to pay! Besides, determined pirates will crack encryption or scan or retype books. And offering unencrypted books can be a selling point, since customers generally hate encryption and Digital Rights Management since it restricts how the product can be read and stored. If you’re determined to encrypt your books, simply use a store such as Kindle, Smashwords or Apple Books.
You might think it was obvious that the more platforms you sell to, the better. However, there are some wrinkles. If one platform sells your book at a lower price than another, then you can find the other platform price-matching; so you effectively trigger a price war with yourself, hurting your margins. (On the other hand, if you want to sell a book for the smallest possible price on Amazon, you might use this to your advantage: have it available for free on other platforms, so Amazon price-matches.)
Also, if you use Smashwords to target Kindle, for example, you can’t then sell the identical edition on Amazon directly. Why would you want to do that? Well, Smashwords doesn’t always produce as good an ebook file as if you created it directly with a tool such as Jutoh, so you might want to handle some sites yourself, and have Smashwords distribute to the remaining ones.
If you want to take advantage of Amazon’s free ebook promotions, you need to sell it exclusively on Amazon – an annoying restriction, but the promotions can be very worthwhile for visibility and collecting reviews.
In this chapter, we’ve explored the differences between the major ebooks formats, and we’ve looked at the most significant distribution platforms, and their pros and cons. Next, we’ll try to give some general advice on how you might market your ebooks.
Contents | Start | End | Previous: Chapter 25: Troubleshooting Your Book | Next: Chapter 27: Marketing Your Book