[FM Discuss] Putting FLOSS Manuals in the Kindle Store

Mon May 16 07:24:34 PDT 2011

Hi James -

Very exciting! This approach works well to raise awareness about a topic and
I'm glad your forging the first Kindle book for FM! Thanks for the nice
write up, also. Be sure you also post it on the Booki blog, I'm sure others
will be interested.

Anne

On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 7:14 PM, 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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