[FM Discuss] Putting FLOSS Manuals in the Kindle Store

Sun May 15 17:18:09 PDT 2011

awes.ome.

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 10:14, James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
> In about 24 hours my book "Make Your Own Sugar Activities!" will be
> available for purchase in the Kindle store.  You'll also be able to
> download the first few chapters for free.  I think that this is
> something we should routinely do with finished FLOSS Manuals.  It is a
> lot less work than putting a book on Lulu and the Kindle store has a
> lot more visibility.  I'm not suggesting that we give up on Lulu, just
> that we add the Kindle store to the ways you can get a FLOSS Manual.
>
> Booki already does most of what you need to make a Kindle-formatted
> book, and OBJAVI *could* be modified to do the rest.  Until then
> you'll need to do some work by hand:
>
> 1).  Export the book as an EPUB.
>
> 2).  Run the kindlegen program (a free download for Windows, Linux,
> and Mac OS) on your EPUB to create something that is readable on the
> Kindle.  This will NOT meet Amazon's requirements for the Kindle
> Store, because it lacks a Table of Contents and a cover image, but the
> Kindle can use it.
>
> 3).  Using either the Kindle Previewer or a real Kindle look through
> the book for formatting errors and go back to Booki to fix them.  I
> found a problem with bullet points because I used Open Office to
> create the first few chapters of my book, then I pasted the chapters
> into TWiki.  This caused my <li> tags to have <p> tags nested within
> them, a problem I would NOT have had if I had used TWiki (or Booki) to
> write the chapters.  I was able to fix this in Booki by turning on
> HTML mode in the editor and getting rid of the <p> tags.  In the
> Kindle having the <p> tags in there makes the bullet appear on one
> line and the text appear on the following line.
>
> Note that the docs on Amazon's site say you can't use <table> tags in
> your book.  That is wrong.  The current Kindles display tables just
> fine.
>
> Another thing you should do is add a section to your Introduction
> explaining how to get the book in various formats, including the
> website, Lulu, the Internet Archive, etc.  When people download the
> free sample of your book they will get this information.  If you have
> code samples in your book the Kindle will NOT render them well at all
> so you should direct your readers to the website so they can see the
> code properly formatted.
>
> The Kindle Previewer is available for Windows and Mac OS, but not
> Linux.  However, the Windows version runs under WINE.  It is too slow
> under WINE to be used to check every page for formatting errors, but
> it works well to verify that your cover image and Table of Contents
> are correct.
>
> 4).  Create a cover image and upload it to your book.  The cover image
> does not have to be linked to any page of your book, it just needs to
> be uploaded.  You can use the "Insert Picture" button in the editor,
> upload the image, then cancel out.  The image itself can be a white
> rectangle with a 5 pixel grey border.  I used a 600 x 800 canvas, but
> Amazon recommends something a bit larger.  You can easily create a
> usable cover image in The GIMP.  I put an orange rectangle with
> rounded corners at the bottom of the image which contains the same
> text that we put on the back covers of printed FLOSS Manuals.  I also
> put my name on the cover image as the author.  The printed book does
> not have that.  Amazon wants books to have authors.  You can have
> multiple contributors, including photographers, translators, etc.
> They will all be listed on the Kindle Store page.
>
> 5).  Re-export your book as an EPUB.
>
> 6).  Create a directory and unzip your EPUB into it.
>
> 7).  Make a copy of the XHTML file for your first chapter named
> something like ch000_table_of_contents.xhtml and use an HTML editor to
> make a Table of Contents out of it.  The Seamonkey web browser from
> Mozilla has a perfectly adequate HTML editor that you can use for
> this.  Each chapter in the TOC must have a relative link to the
> chapter XHTML file that contains it.
>
> 8).  Use the same HTML editor to edit your Introduction chapter and
> put a centered <h1> entry with the title of your book at the top of
> the chapter.  Underneath it put a centered paragraph with "by Author
> Name".  I chose to put this text in italics.
>
> 9).  Using a text editor edit the content.opf file.  You'll need to
> fix the top of the file to be like this:
>
>  <metadata>
>    <dc:publisher>FLOSS Manuals http://flossmanuals.net</dc:publisher>
>    <dc:rights scheme="License">GPLv2+</dc:rights>
>    <dc:language>en</dc:language>
>    <dc:title>Make Your Own Sugar Activities!</dc:title>
>    <dc:creator>James D. Simmons</dc:creator>
>    <dc:date>2010-11-28</dc:date>
>    <dc:date scheme="start">2010.12.09-07.20</dc:date>
>    <dc:date scheme="last-modified">2011.05.13-00.00</dc:date>
>    <dc:date scheme="published">2011.05.13-18.25</dc:date>
>    <dc:identifier
> id="primary_id">http://en.flossmanuals.net/epub/ActivitiesGuideSugar/2010.11.28-14.18.35</dc:identifier>
>    <dc:identifier
> scheme="booki.cc">http://booki.flossmanuals.net/make-your-own-sugar-activities/2011.05.13-18.25</dc:identifier>
>    <meta name="cover" content="att000_MYOSA_Cover" />
>  </metadata>
>  <guide>
>        <reference type="toc" title="Table Of Contents"
> href="ch000_table_of_contents.xhtml" />
>  </guide>
>
> Note that I have changed the creator to be myself and I've added
> entries pointing to the cover image and my new TOC page.  The TOC page
> will need its own <item> like this:
>
>    <item href="ch000_table_of_contents.xhtml"
> media-type="application/xhtml+xml" id="ch000_table_of_contents"/>
>
> The cover image should already have an <item> you can point to.
>
> 10).  Now you can zip up all these files and then change the suffix of
> the zip file to .epub.  Interestingly, this is not an EPUB according
> to the spec, because of the mimetype file.  According to Wikipedia:
>
> "The mimetype file must be a text document in ASCII and must contain
> the string application/epub+zip. It must also be uncompressed,
> unencrypted, and the first file in the ZIP archive. The purpose of
> this file is to provide a more reliable way for applications to
> identify the mimetype of the file than just the .epub extension."
>
> Our mimetype file says application/x-booki+zip and probably was not
> stored uncompressed in the beginning of the file.  The nice thing is
> that kindlegen doesn't care.  It DOES insist that you use a .epub
> suffix for the file, though.  .zip will not be recognized as an EPUB
> file by kindlegen.
>
> 11).  Run kindlegen against your new EPUB and you should have an
> Amazon-compliant MOBI file ready for the Kindle store.  The file will
> be larger than your original EPUB because it generates images for
> several different kinds of Kindle outputs.  The MOBI that the customer
> gets will be sized like your EPUB, more or less.  Use Kindle Previewer
> or a real Kindle to check it out.  Also, pay attention to any messages
> coming from the kindlegen utility.  If you didn't set up the cover
> image or the TOC correctly kindlegen should tell you.
>
> Sign up for Kindle Direct Publishing, upload your book and your cover
> image, price the book at US .99, and in 24 hours or so the money
> should start rolling in.  Soon you'll be eating lunch with the
> Algonquin Round Table and living a life that Richard Castle might
> envy.
>
> James Simmons
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
> http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net
>

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