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In this chapter we explore ebook formats, and explain how Jutoh fits into the process of getting your book onto virtual shelves. We’ll take a look at how you get your content into Jutoh, and other tools that you can use alongside Jutoh.
There are three major ebook formats in use today:
Epub, an open standard supported by all non-Kindle reader devices.
Kindle (actually a family of formats including .mobi and .azk), specific to the Amazon Kindle but also supported on other devices.
PDF (Portable Document Format), an Adobe proprietary format supported by most devices.
There are other formats, including plain text and HTML, but the Big Three above are the important ones.
Epub 2 is the industry standard with wide adoption, and is flexible enough for most ebook purposes. It’s basically a zip archive containing the content in XHTML form, plus ‘metadata’ that describes the content and provides navigation information. An Epub reader (such as Apple Books) tries to format the book in a standard way, but inevitably there are differences between implementations.
Most Epub ereaders handle Epub 2; the more advanced Epub 3 format does not have wide adoption yet, but there is software such as Adobe Digital Editions and AZARDI that can read Epub 3. Jutoh supports a number of Epub 3 features, such as narration and interactivity via JavaScript.
Amazon bought and adopted the Mobipocket format for their Kindle devices, hence the extension .mobi. Mobipocket is like a cut-down version of Epub: in fact the Kindlegen application used to compile a Kindle/Mobipocket book uses all the same files that you see in an Epub 2 book, distilling them to a proprietary format. However, the way a Mobipocket reader interprets the book is different from an Epub reader, with limitations on formatting that have to be borne in mind by the author, or worked around by the authoring software. Amazon’s newer ‘KF8’ format eliminated many of these limitations, and Jutoh smooths over most of the differences between the two formats. Amazon now requires creation and submission of .epub files instead of .mobi for reflowable books; Jutoh can create both .mobi files and Kindle-optimized .epub files.
Note that Epub is still not really Amazon’s standard file format: it’s one of several that can be converted to their internal formats. The .mobi format is still needed for fixed-layout files submitted to Amazon, at the time of writing.
Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) has always had a strong showing in ebooks on the desktop, because it can faithfully render the layout you see in publications such as brochures, with a direct translation from a conventional word processor file. However it is less satisfactory on mobile devices, because PDFs cannot generally be ‘reflowed’ to take advantage of small screens and requests for different type size. So on a small screen you end up having to zoom in and out and pan around the document. Clearly this is not a good general solution for reading books, unless you have a device with a particularly large screen, and even then you will have trouble adjusting the type size without content either disappearing off the screen or leaving blank areas. If you need to distribute PDF files, either for reading on a screen or making a print book, Jutoh can help you create them by generating ODT which you can load into OpenOffice or LibreOffice and from there, export to PDF.
Since Jutoh can handle all major ebook formats, it means that you can distribute your books for Apple Books on iPhone/iPad, Amazon Kindle, any Android device, Kobo, Barnes & Noble Nook, and many other devices as well as for any PC or Mac.
Jutoh is an editor for creating your ebooks; you can create a book from scratch in Jutoh, or you can import an existing book. As we’ve seen, Jutoh can generate the major ebook formats. Unlike most word processors, Jutoh divides ebook content into sections, which is more naturally suited to the way ebooks work. Jutoh is a bit like a word processor in that it supports content formatting, but it is geared towards generating a variety of ebook formats, with various tools to help with this task. You can add images to your documents, and (experimentally) sound and video where supported by the ebook reader.
For clarity, here are some things that Jutoh is not:
Jutoh is not just a converter. Although you can import from several different file formats, it’s an editor so you can write content and apply formatting within Jutoh.
Jutoh is not an HTML editor. You can pass some raw HTML and CSS through to the finished book if you wish, but Jutoh is in control of most of the HTML generation and so you can’t edit all of the generated HTML from within Jutoh. (However the publisher’s version of Jutoh, Jutoh Plus, does have an HTML template facility to allow you to take over some or all of the HTML generation, and the ability to insert JavaScript files into the book. See www.jutoh.com/jutohplus for more details.)
Jutoh is not a full-blown page layout program. Don’t expect to do multiple columns or absolute positioning of images; Jutoh is optimized for the relatively simple needs of most ebooks which are generally read on small devices with little space for elaborate formatting. Having said that, Jutoh does support text boxes, tables and objects that float to the left or right of text; and some tricks are available if you need to go beyond Jutoh’s formatting capabilities.
Jutoh helps you create a basic cover page for your book with the simple cover designer, which can substitute information from the metadata (title, author and so on) into the design. Create a design from scratch, or start from one of the templates provided by Jutoh.
Jutoh has facilities for compiling a table of contents and index, and can compile references either at the end of a section or in a separate section. You can of course create links between pages, and links to external web sites.
In addition, Jutoh contains tools to help collate research that doesn’t belong in your finished book – for example text and image scraps – and has its own desktop where you can put ‘sticky’ notes, shortcuts to applications and documents, and even little image slideshows. Jutoh also helps with your creativity, providing a ‘storyboard’ tool where you can brainstorm ideas and plots by placing and dragging cards, and the ‘Writing Prompts’ tool sets you timed writing exercises. You can set writing goals for the whole book or for the current session, and see how many words you’ve written. The software provides copious writing advice for fiction authors, and inspirational quotations from other writers.
Jutoh works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (one licence is good for any or all platforms, which is handy if you have a variety of machines), and it can be run from a USB drive. All information for a given Jutoh project is stored within a single file with extension ‘jutoh’ which makes for easy transfer and backup.
Jutoh is good for most book types, including:
novels;
short story collections;
biographies;
comics;
graphic novels;
self-help books;
articles;
manuals;
photographic books;
textbooks with simple layout requirements.
You can insert images into Jutoh, which can be photographic or artistic or could be used for symbols and decorative touches. Jutoh’s table support can be handy for scientific books; mathematic or other formulae aren’t supported but can be achieved by inserting pictures. As we said earlier, don’t expect the layout of a complex word processor document to be reproduced exactly, as if exporting to PDF.
Jutoh has support for audio and video but these file types are not yet recognised by a wide variety of reader hardware and software and so should be approached with caution.
If you are feeling adventurous, you can explore Jutoh’s ‘form objects’ which allow addition of input controls for adding interactivity, in conjunction with JavaScript code. Jutoh also supports synchronisation of narration with book content. These features are supported by only a few ereaders at present.
These are roughly the steps involved in creating and distributing an ebook.
Create a project, importing an existing file if you have one.
Edit the book content, metadata and cover.
Choose a configuration (approximately equivalent to the format) and compile the ebook with the Compile button.
Check the Epub file for errors using EpubCheck via the Check button.
If there are errors shown by step 4, go to step 2.
Preview the file manually. If there are errors, go to step 2.
Upload to one or more web sites.
Publicise.
Bask in the adulation of your readers.
Steps 1 to 5 are supported directly by Jutoh. As you can see, there are elements of both file conversion and editing in Jutoh. If you’re really lucky, you could import a file and find there’s nothing to do except generate the ebook. Or you can create a project from scratch, and do all your editing in Jutoh (which is what I’m doing for this book). More usually, you’ll import some work you have already done, and massage the book in Jutoh until you’re happy with it, going around the loop between items 2 and 6. You’re likely to want to improve the presentation of the book by tweaking the formatting, creating a table of contents, and so on.
Because Jutoh runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, you can use most desktop or notebook machines for your editing and even switch between them, since the Jutoh file format is portable (and a single Jutoh licence is good for any operating systems you may be using). Jutoh can run from a mobile drive; you can read more about that in the Appendix and in the user manual.
A question people often ask is: “Can Jutoh create an encrypted ebook?” The short answer is No, but in fact this would be a useless feature. The sites that you will be uploading your book to require unencrypted content, and it’s the ebook vendor site (such as Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble or Apple Books) that will be doing any encrypting. Unless you’re a big publishing company with a deal with Adobe, for example, you won’t be able to do any official encryption that can be recognised by any ebook readers. If you’re distributing the book yourself, probably the best policy is to make a virtue of the lack of encryption: customers tend to hate DRM (Digital Rights Management) and it restricts their freedom to use the book on different devices. So, just put a paragraph on the title page asking them politely not to copy the book in an unauthorised way. Any piracy that does happen may well boost your sales by increasing the buzz around your book. However, you can easily stop any person from freely downloading your commercial book from your own site, by signing up with a vendor service that serves a link to your book only after payment has been received.
You can create a blank project, add book section sections, and type away. Or, you can import existing content. This is best done when you first create the project. You can import a folder containing multiple text and HTML documents, one file per book section, or you can import a single file containing one of these formats: plain text, DOCX, ODT, HTML, or Epub.
Note that Jutoh has a different internal representation from any of the formats it can import, and so it won’t preserve the document formatting 100%. This varies according to format. With HTML and Epub import, Jutoh will read just a basic level of CSS styling and you may need to do further style and content editing after import, depending on the complexity of the original CSS and HTML.
The preferred import format is DOCX (Microsoft Word XML) or ODT (Open Document Text). You can convert a variety of word processing formats (such as DOC) to DOCX or ODT simply by opening them in LibreOffice or OpenOffice (free downloads) and saving as DOCX or ODT. Most style information from the DOCX or ODT document will be preserved.
For import of DOCX, ODT and HTML files, Jutoh will help you split the book into sections by matching against heading styles or content.
You can also import DOCX, ODT, HTML and text into an existing project using the File | Import | Import Document command.
For more information on importing, see Chapter 5. Importing Files.
We have learned a little about ebook formats, what Jutoh is, the steps involved in getting a book to the point of distribution, what files Jutoh can import, and what other tools can be used alongside Jutoh. Next, we dive into an example of creating a project and creating an ebook.
Contents | Start | End | Previous: Preface | Next: Chapter 2: Getting Started