[FM Discuss] Putting FLOSS Manuals in the Kindle Store

Mon May 16 07:29:00 PDT 2011

Anne,

I was thinking of doing a Blog post on this.  Consider the email a first draft.

Thanks,

James Simmons

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 9:24 AM, Anne Gentle <annegentle at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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